Copy one USB connected drive to another USB connected drive

Symantec Ghost can easily handle this.

Also, here are some free alternatives:

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/09/05/5-free-apps-to-clone-your-hard-drive/

I woud suggest the driveimage xml stephenbyrd had in his article I have used this in the past to backup and restore a harddrive. It was pretty easy and worked well. And its free.

Thanks for the replies, I have downloaded and installed driveimage xml and I'm trying it now.  It looks like it is going to take 5+ hours.

I'm also going to look at ghost (I have version 7 but I assume the USB option was added since then).

The only issue with driveimage xml is it won't copy the whole drive -- ideally I'd like the entire drive to be copied, not just the bootable partition, it looks like I'll get the XP partition but not the backup partition.

Will ghost copy the entire drive, including all the partitions?

Thanks again for the quick responses.

I use ghost solution suite 11 and using the ghost boot cd you can get all partitions. On our images we have a data partition and reinstall partition. Ghosting the drive with that does get them all.

For future reference. Acronis is a much more stable and robust backup and imaging program. It has a free trial
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

My computer does not have a USB boot option, so you don't get any USB support until you have booted into windows so I don't think the ghost boot cd option would work for me.

as i say try acronis.  Once installed you can create a boot disk that will launch a unix based interface with USB drivers

You could always create a BartPE bootable cd (http://nu2.nu/pebuilder/) which will load your USB support and boot into a "mini windows" environment.  It's fairly easy to setup and since you already own Ghost, you won't need to buy anything.

And by the way, Ghost WILL copy the entire drive, including all partitions.

I use this free software before to clone my hard drive to another
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/

Sorry for so many replies, but were you trying to boot into a Ghost CD when you said you didn't have USB support?  If you have both drives plugged in via USB to an existing Windows environment, you'd just need to run Ghost within Windows and you should see those USB drives.

Well after 3+ hours of running driveimage xml it stops at 75% with this error:

Error: NotifyException

Read Error: The request could not be performed
becuase of an I/O device error.

Info: Partition Copy Error
Address: 004E1C0D

Stack Dump:

I downloaded ghost so I can try that next, not sure anything will work given that the drive is damaged.

please try acronis as i recommended. I always get good results

I downloaded and installed acronis and when I start it up I get this error:

AppName: trueimage.exe       AppVer: 13.0.0.5055       ModName: msvcr80.dll
ModVer: 8.0.50727.3053       Offset: 000046b4

Have you tried ghost yet?

ghost is installing now

will report back in a bit

thanks

when i select copy drive it reports:

This feature in not enabled. To enable this feature you may need to license the product.

I would be happy to pay if I knew for sure it would work.

Did you have any issues with this drive before you decided to clone it?  Maybe you need to run checkdisk on that drive and make sure you don't have any errors on it before cloning.  Just open a command prompt, change to that drive letter (F: or whatever letter) then type in chkdsk /r  After that try running driveimage again if ghost is giving you feature problems.

Yes I have major issues with this drive, it is crashing and fails the drive check program from the mfg.  

I mentioned in my original post that the hard drive was "dying"

I have run chkdsk /r multiple times and it had repaired what it could.

I ran it before I did the first drive image and have run it before each try with both acronis and ghost

thanks

I'm currently using the unstoppable copier to backup the drive, I'm not sure if there is a manual way to "build" this new drive so it is bootable.  I'm not sure if simply moving all the c:\ files to the new drive is enough to get the drive to boot up.  Thanks.

There is a free & opensource cloning software call g4u that usually work when everything else fail. You might want to give it a try. It is text based, and work very fast.

I'm using R-Drive Image to do a disk to disk copy of the drive.  It has another hour to run and then i will post back with the results.

Thanks for all the assistance.

Good luck.

I'm guessing this is not going to work.  It has been sitting at 66% for a while now and the estimated time left has grown from 36 minutes to 52 minutes.

Let it run. On my failing drive it did behave the same but it completed.
Otherwise use R-STUDIO tool trial to image the drive. It does it for sure.

OK I am letting it run, it is still at 66% and now up to 1 hour 4 minutes to complete.

Still at just 66% with 3 hours and 33 minutes to go.  Should I just let it sit there and run, is there really a chance it'll complete?

Cancel it. And run R-STUDIO: http://r-studio.com/
Install trial and run it. In tools find Create Image. It will not copy but create compressed image. Then restore from this image to healthy drive.

Installed R-Studio:

Told it to create an image of the G drive.

I got this error:

Error reading sector 148662892 on disk G:
Data error (cyclic redundancy check) (23).

I said IGNORE ALL but its been sitting at 34 minutes left all night. (way longer than 34 minutes)

In the morning it had this error:

Error: Read from disk failed
119 read and 0 write errors were ignored by user

It created the image file at 32gb but it is no good.

So that pretty much means nothing works because this drive is so damaged.

Yup. That is correct. Try to restore from created image using Drive Image and see what you get there.
If you have important data worth of paying $400 - 1000$ on the drive then it is time to call to data recovery lab.

I was able to manually get the data I needed off the user directory and the drive has been replaced under warranty.  Many thanks for all the replies.