LostInTechnology

HDClone Review – Cloning A Windows Virtual Drive

Posted on 03. Aug, 2009 by Douglas Reynolds in Software, Windows

HDClone is a utility for cloning physical or logical drives.  Cloning is the process of copying the exact contents of one drive to another.  Although the drives themselves may be different, various sizes (the target drive cannot be smaller), partition schemas, drive types (i.e. IDE, SATA, SATAII), the data from the source drive will be duplicated exactly on the second drive.

Cloning is an excellent method of creating bootable backups which will indeed suffice to allow the direct replacement of one drive with another, thus allowing booting up to an exact representation of the original drive from the cloned one.  Cloning is also an excellent approach to drive upgrade.

Features

HDClone can also create an image of a drive, where rather than a direct copy from drive to drive process is performed, an exact image of a disk is saved to a special type of file, known as an image file.  An image file may then be archived as a backup, shared, and then later restored to reproduce the drive for which it was taken at the time it was created.

One of the best features I found in using HDClone was it’s AutoExpand functionality.  HDClone will automatically auto-expand a volume to meet the size of the volume partition that it is being copied to.  This is great, because otherwise, if one were cloning a drive with a partition size of 80GB to a 320GB drive, only the 80GB partition would be copied, not being able to take advantage of the larger drive capacity.

Versions

HDClone has a free basic version, along with 4 additional fee license versions.  The free basic version is the one which I used in my virtual drive cloning process even though HDClone doesn’t discuss cloning of virtual drives on its site.  The process of cloning a virtual drive is very close to that of cloning a physical drive.  I happen to use VirtualBox for virtualization, which is also free and definitely worthy of its own article.

My HDClone Process Run-Down

• Download and extract HDClone to a directory
• Extract hdclone.iso to a USB drive
• Create a new virtual machine with drive of needed specifications
• Attach the new virtual drive as a slave to the primary master drive
• Adjust the boot order to CD/DVD only, disable any other type
• Insert the USB drive into port and then eject it from host (otherwise resource will be taken by host and not available to virtual machine
• Assign the USB drive as the CD/DVD so that it will be detected as CD/DVD
• Launch the virtual machine instance to boot from the USB drive
• Run HDClone Copy
• If errors exist following copy, shut down virtual machine, re-enable hard drive on boot, and restart the virtual machine to launch Windows.  Open My Computer and select the new drive properties and run CheckDisk utility to repair errors.
• Shut down Windows
• Detach new drive from Primary Master
• Ensure all settings on new virtual machine are correct
• Boot from new virtual machine

My Experience with HDClone

Overall, I rate my experience with HDClone Very Good, like an 8 out of 10.  I had a bit of trouble with the AutoExpanding feature on the first couple of tries, but I believe that to be my fault.  Once I went back and reformatted my new virtual drive and created a new partition of the size I wanted, HDClone then successfully expanded the image to the size of the new drive.

What I really deducted a couple of points for is that during the process of copying, HDClone reported over 5000 read errors and over 5800 write errors.  This was good to know, however, HDClone then suggested I run CheckDisk on my new drive to look for any bad sectors and/or files.

First of all, its not a real drive, so I know there is no physical damage, second of all, why couldn’t HDClone do this for me.  I ended up having to launch Windows in my source Primary Master drive so that I could run CheckDisk on my target Slave drive.  Running CheckDisk took care of the reported bad sectors and I was then able to detach my slave from the master and boot from it directly – success!

Conclusion

HDClone free edition did an awesome job, and although I deducted a couple of points for having to go into Windows in order to run CheckDisk, I have to take into consideration that the program is free after all.  HDClone was also fast, I did an exact copy with no compression and copied 80GB in 20 Minutes.  With that being said, I’d recommend giving HDClone a go the next time you need to clone a virtual drive, and probably a physical drive for that matter.  HDClone FTW!

(By) Douglas Reynolds is an application developer, holds a degree in Software Engineering, and owns an independent Flex application development consulting company.  He maintains a personal and technology blog located at dougrdotnet.  Find him on Twitter @dougrdotnet and LinkedIn.

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Tags: Drive Clone, Drive Copy, Drive Image, HDClone, Software, Windows