You want to create a copy of your current hard drive without having to reinstall everything: clone it – Solved!

I’ve often been asked how to replace a suspect hard drive before it fails completely without having to reinstall all the programs and then copy all the data back onto it… well, here’s a free OpenSource solution that clones your hard drive quickly – no, very quickly!

 

CloneZilla is a super-fast cloning tool that can clone one system to another, or one-to-many (over the LAN) using multi-casting (or broadcasting) technology.

Clonezilla, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery.

Clonezilla Live is suitable for single machine backup and restore.

Clonezilla SE (Server Edition) is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously.

Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the hard disk which increases the clone efficiency.

Clonezilla supports many file systems including GNU/Linux,FAT, NTFS, HFS+, and more; no matter if it’s 32 or 64 bit.

See here for screen shots: http://clonezilla.org/screenshot/

See here for downloading Clonezilla and instructions on how to create a bootable CD: http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/

I’m sure this will save you lots of time and trouble – consider donating to Clonezilla here: Donate

Update on 28Nov2009:
Here’s another great article listing the “5 Ways to Clone and copy your hard drive” (all free tools) covering: Paragon’s Drive Backup Express (Windows), DriveImage XML (Windows), CloneZilla (cross platform), XXCLONE (Windows), EASEUS Disk Copy (cross platform).