Cloning Your Hard Disk For Free

7 Sep 2007

I wish I had better results to report for my need for this application, but I am quite please to speak to the quality of this fantastic free application. XXCLONE is a disk cloning tool. Tonight, the OS hard drive in my Primary Domain Controller was doing some odd clicking sounding noises. I decided to beat it to the punch, and change the drive. Of course I didn’t want to reinstall Windows 2003 Server again, so I decided to try and clone the drive.

The tool is simple and fast, it took less than 20 minutes to completely clone the OS drive to a new partition on another drive. It made the proper changes to the Master Boot Record, Boot.ini and set the drive up perfectly. I switched the disks out and it booted straight away. This is where my problem comes in, but it’s not related to xxclone. The machine has a corrupted Active Directory. I haven’t spent much time trying to repair or demote it, I will tomorrow, but I wanted to get the world out about this tool. If you need to transfer your drive from one to another, this tool works great.

UPDATE: So I am back to good. Since it did not like Active Directory, I put the old disk back in, uninstalled Active Directory, recloned the disk, and now I am back to good. I am minus my Active Directory, but I am not minding that so much, I like the simplicity of a workgroup at home. So check out xxclone, it works like a charm!

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