Hard Disk Cloning/Imaging from inside Windows

[JorgeA]

Wow jaclaz, this is magnificent!

Youve given me a lot to chew on here, and that's good.

Now I'll go and start digesting all the links you provided.

Grazie mille!

--JorgeA

[j3schmidt]

Newbie here, but I thought I'd mention that there is another alternative that's similar to cloning but slightly different. The popular technology site Make Use Of recommends a VMWare product (free) called vCenter Converter Standalone Client. What it basically does is converts your already-running system to a VMWare virtual machine image that you can then access in VMWare, Virtual Box or QEMU. Works great as a backup solution too.

Read the article at Make Use Of - "Turn Your Old Mission-Critical PC Into a VM Before it Dies"

Download VMWare vCenter Converter Standalone Client from VMWare.com

(You'll need a free VMWare account to do so -- you don't have to fill out your real information, and you can even use a disposable email service like Mailinator if you don't want your real inbox to be bombarded with VMWare emails.)

Edited October 3, 2012 by j3schmidt

[jaclaz]

Newbie here, but I thought I'd mention that there is another alternative that's similar to cloning but slightly different.

It is a nice approach , but it is COMPLETELY UNLIKE cloning.

It is more or less the same difference between a real picture (photo) and a drawing made by an artist like you know, some trials where photographs cannot be taken.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2193352/Samsung-V-Apple-Samsung-ordered-pay-1BILLION-jury-says-STOLE-patented-designs.html

Legal battle: In this drawing from inside the San Jose court room earlier this month, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller addresses a judge during the California trial

Or, maybe better, it is like if you want to store a copy of a letter, instead of making a photocopy, you translate it in (say) Chinese, and when you need to read the original English one, you re-translate it from Chinese.

Something may (and most probaly will) be "lost in translation".

There are several P2V (Physical to Virtual) solutions (only a very few of them listed here):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical-to-Virtual

The issue here is that the inverse process (V2P) has (obviously) far less diffusion and, though of course possible, it is scarcely documented and (in these examples) will require anyway a third party "imaging" tool and/or a "repair" and/or a sysprep or similar:

http://www.vmware.com/support/v2p/index.html

http://www.acronis.com/articles/v2p/

http://www.blueshiftblog.com/?p=107

Of course it all depends on what is the actual "final goal".

To me cloning a disk simply means that when and if the original disk fails, all that is needed i to take the clone from the shelf it is stored on, replace with it the failed disk drive and power on again the machine, or, in the case of an image, re-deploy that image to a new disk fitted to the machine and power it on.

jaclaz