Clone a pc?

[sam_roberts30]

This is kinda storage related as it involves cloning a hard drive, well that's my reason for posting this here.

 

This is my problem. I have a HTPC that is running perfectly in the cinema room and I want to run an identical htpc on the same network for the living room. My HTPC accesses my Unraid where all my rips are stored and I want the second one to do the same so we don't have to boot up the cinema whenever we want to watch a movie/tv series.

 

Would it be possible to simply make a clone of the first HTPC hard drive onto a new drive and install it into my second HTPC system using something like trueimage? Change a few drivers for the different hardware. I know I will have to change the windows licence to a new one, which I already have. It would just be soooooo much easier to do that than start trying to get my settings all the same.

 

What do you think? Is it do-able?

[Benni-chan]

if the hardware is not too different, it should work without problem...

we use the same approach at my university, when we want to update all the pcs. we update one, install all necessary software, etc. and clone that "master-image" to all other pcs and then just change network-name, ip, etc.

[sam_roberts30]

Sweet!!!! Thanks for the reassurance.

[kizer]

I personally clone every machine that visits my house. God only knows how many times I've restored my mother in laws machine.

[sam_roberts30]

Is there a way to clone a machine over your LAN?

[WeeboTech]

Is there a way to clone a machine over your LAN?

 

 

Trueimage has a mode that reads the network.

I believe Ghost does also.

[sureguy]

Clonezilla can also do this, and it's free. The only issue I've had with it is it had issues restoring to a different sized hard drive. Windows wouldn't boot and rather than investigate I used true image instead.

 

sent via tapatalk

 

 

[kizer]

Yep I use Arconis True Image to do all my cloning and restoring over the network. I typically use a Boot USB and then fire off the Clone/Restore.

[sam_roberts30]

Just double checking it will do what i want before I buy it.

 

With true image. I can read a remote computer that is on the LAN and clone it's hard drive to the local computer with the new hard drive in?

 

 

[JonathanM]

Just double checking it will do what i want before I buy it.

 

With true image. I can read a remote computer that is on the LAN and clone it's hard drive to the local computer with the new hard drive in?

Never tried it live from one pc to another, but I know it works if you save an image file on the network from the first pc and then read it back to another machine afterwards. I doubt it will do a disk to disk copy directly.

[Talsit]

Before you buy it...

 

Do you own any Seagate drives? The Seagate Discwizard is a basic version of TruImage. It requires that you have a Seagate drive somewhere in your system, I plug in my Seagate external and it lets me clone to anything else attached to my computer, just used it last week to de-RAID two OCZ SSDs I was using as a boot drive and clone my RAID 10 data drives to a WD 3 TB drive.

 

***EDIT: And it's free!

[chip]

Clonezilla can also do this, and it's free. The only issue I've had with it is it had issues restoring to a different sized hard drive. Windows wouldn't boot and rather than investigate I used true image instead.

 

sent via tapatalk

 

Do you recall if the image was from a smaller and you went to a larger or vise versa?

I recall this happening with DriveImage xml. I think if you take an image of say a 120gb and then try to throw it on a 80gb it won't work. So with some of the image software stuff you have to be careful.

[trurl]

...The Seagate Discwizard is a basic version of TruImage. It requires that you have a Seagate drive somewhere in your system, I plug in my Seagate external and it lets me clone to anything else attached to my computer...

 

***EDIT: And it's free!

This is how I do it too.

[sureguy]

Clonezilla can also do this, and it's free. The only issue I've had with it is it had issues restoring to a different sized hard drive. Windows wouldn't boot and rather than investigate I used true image instead.

 

sent via tapatalk

 

Do you recall if the image was from a smaller and you went to a larger or vise versa?

I recall this happening with DriveImage xml. I think if you take an image of say a 120gb and then try to throw it on a 80gb it won't work. So with some of the image software stuff you have to be careful.

 

It was going from a 1TB drive (only 25gb of data) to a 60gig SSD if I recall.  TrueImage appeared to do an additional step after it copied it.  It probably has something to do with the size of the partition, and I probably could have fixed it with a partitioning tool, but I was in a rush, and re-cloning with TrueImage was faster than troubleshooting.  Happily it worked.