backup the whole harddisk on a external USB hard drive

['chris']

hi

howto backup the whole harddisk on an external USB hard drive ?
I'd like to have just a single image file ?
HDClone cannot use because overwrites MBR and PBR from the external USB hard drive.

kind regards
chris

[Roger Faucher]

Products such as Acronis®' True Image Home 2009 should give you what you want. See:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/

Make a great day!

Roger

['chris']

@Roger
sorry for the mistake you should get 10 points from me, cannot change.

greetings
chris

['chris']

is it any freeware ?

[Ronald Postma · Accepted solution]

HI Chris,
YOu can Try Hirens Boot CD, but you may have problems imaging to an USB-disk. You have to attach the drive in the main menu, before you start any program. There are different disk clone tools one this disk. for info look here:
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

Do not know if you can download it there, but if you google around you will fin links.

Have a nice day,
HTH, Ronald

[Roger Faucher]

@'chris':

No problem. It's refreshing that you assign points. Many people still don't get it.

Make a great day!

Roger

[Uwe Zessin]

Another vote for Acronis.

I'm using a 'workstation 9' version since some time, but I don't know what the difference to the home edition is.

The nice thing is that it even provides a plugin for a BartPE bootable media, so I got it working on a modern notebook - the original Linux-based Acronis boot CD did not work reliable.

I can save and restore the whole disk or individual partitions including the MBR and I can resize partitions as part of the restore.

[Rainald T]

I also recommend Acronis.
I'm using "home" v.10 and it works pretty fine under Vista.

Not only that it was an affair of less one hour to set up my wife's and my son's computers with all of the programs installed in app. 45 min. each from a basic image.

I was even able to save the data from the crashed HDD of his old computer.
The main partition of the HDD was corrupt. Not even Bart PE could mount it.
Acronis True Image, however, started from the emergency CD was able to make a backup of the corrupt CD to a USB drive. An on my main computer I could then extract all of the needed directories. 95% of the data could be restored.

As said v. 10 is sufficient and you may find it on eBay for small money.

Rainald

[Ronald Postma]

Acronis works well,
We have the Prof edition to backup over the network.

Acronis is also included in Hirens Boot CD, so give it a shot. I also managed to get Ghost (from Norton) working over USB.

Have a nice day,
Regards, Ronald