My boot drive was 99% full so, I got myself a shiny new hard drive. My experience with Windows is that whenever you swap a drive, either the old or the new one dies, making the experience as painful as possible. But this time I used XXClone, a free program that clones disks. It also lets you set the new disk as your boot device (although you also need to set that in your BIOS) and swaps the drive letters so your new disk can be, for example, Drive C. For $40/year/computer, you can get the pro version that does incremental backup and can do unattended operations.

It took it something under 2 hours to clone a 120G disk. When it was done, my computer booted right up. I am having some little problems — Google Desktop can’t get a connection to localhost — but I doubt they are XXClone’s fault.

Software that works! [Tags: xxclone clone utilities]

Categories: Uncategorized dw