advice using Casper to clone BC drive

Question

Level 1

110 points

advice using Casper to clone BC drive

WinClone is working fine for me but I'd love to find some additional way to clone my BC drive onto an internal hard drive and be able to swap them out if needed.

Note: I'm running XP on a hard drive which is totally independent of my OSX internal drive and I've 4 hard drives, 2 for OSX (1 is an OSX backup clone) and 2 for XP (1 is also an XP backup clone).

I have cloned my existing BC drive to another internal. Both drives are NTFS w/ GUID. My problem is that my Casper clone drive isn't being recognized when I boot to my OS selection screen. I sent the makers of Casper my log files from when I performed the clone and they say that all of my setting for cloning are correct. I don't want to bug them too much since I know BC is beyond their expertise.

Does anyone w/ experience w/ Casper (or just experience) have any ideas on what's going on. When I look at my Casper drive it has all my XP files on it, it just won't be recognized.

Dual 2.66 MacPro, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 6 GB Ram

Posted on Jan 10, 2011 4:55 PM

Reply

Answer 1

rt2 Author

Level 1

110 points

Jan 13, 2011 9:06 AM in response to rt2

Has anyone successfully used Casper to clone their BC drive?

Reply

Answer 2

Csound1

Level 9

60,015 points

Jan 15, 2011 9:40 AM in response to rt2

Can't speak for everyone but Casper never worked well for me, I stuck with winclone.

Reply

Answer 3

rt2 Author

Level 1

110 points

Jan 15, 2011 10:21 AM in response to Csound1

Thanks Csound. I also still depend on WinClone, it's never let me down.

I thought that for once I'd try and get out in front of a possible future problem i.e. WinClone failing to work w/ the next version of the OSX OS. I'm always a bit spooked when a developer quits. Maybe someone will pick it up but I need a way to clone my XP drive that I can depend on.

So far I like Casper for it's simplicity but if I can't boot my cloned drive w/ Casper it will be useless for me.

Reply

Answer 4

Csound1

Level 9

60,015 points

Jan 15, 2011 10:53 AM in response to rt2

I am also perturbed about winclone's future development, where is superduper for windows when you need it?

Reply

Answer 5

The hatter

Level 9

61,001 points

Jan 15, 2011 11:46 AM in response to Csound1

Better support for GUID Partition Table (GPT) Back up and restore not only single GPT volumes but entire disks, including the option of resize during the restore operation

Better support for Apple Boot Camp* Not only back up and restore this kind of configuration, but copy single volumes or entire disks with resize

Better support for Apple HFS+
Not only resize, but also create, format, or get read only access to this file system through our program.

Express Resize Partition
Increase free space on one partition by utilizing the unused space of an adjacent partition (including partitions of Apple Boot Camp)

http://www.paragon-software.com/business/pm-professional/

Reply

Answer 6

rt2 Author

Level 1

110 points

Jan 15, 2011 11:57 AM in response to The hatter

Thank you hatter for your reply. Just so I'm sure I understand you correctly.....you're saying that you believe the Paragon cloning software to be a better suited product for cloning and restoring a Boot Camp hard drive than Casper?

I may be wrong but I thought I saw elsewhere that you liked Casper.

What I'm looking for is the ability to clone my XP hard drive and restore it to a new hard drive so that I can just swap the drives out if my XP source drive fails.

Reply

Answer 7

The hatter

Level 9

61,001 points

Jan 15, 2011 12:23 PM in response to rt2

No, at one time it looked like, when Acronis, Ghost etc were not, that Casper 6 would, and the only such commercial program. Plus there were one or two positives.

Having one person say it did not work for them, well if I look at threads under "OS X Snow Leopard" and news sites I'd guess 5% or 10,000 people found 10.6.6 or 10.6 to "fail" or not work or live up to expectations and had trouble.

I use Paragon to clone Windows and it is as easy as... SuperDuper or CCC.

CopyCatX was also mentioned at capable of full drive - Mac OS and Windows, but maybe that uses sector copy?? not familiar with it.

Paragon is not cheap but then Casper and CopyCatX are also in the $50-59 market range. And they do support a replacement for installing Windows instead of Boot Camp Assistant; resizing partitions (WinPE or linux CD) and enough features that I have it installed on all my computers now.

As always I like to use Wikipedia to start my research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CopyCatX

Reply

Answer 8

rt2 Author

Level 1

110 points

Jan 15, 2011 12:31 PM in response to The hatter

Well I said I might be wrong....and evidently I was. Sorry. I'm looking into Paragon right now.

Thanks for the tip.

Reply

Answer 9

rt2 Author

Level 1

110 points

Jan 15, 2011 6:30 PM in response to rt2

Success. Downloaded Paragon Partition Manager Pro and was able to make a bootable XP clone of my Boot Camp drive.

Not sure what the optimum program settings are for cloning, I used HDD Raw for my initial clone, but at least it worked. To clone a 500 GB drive w/ 38 GB of XP to a new, empty 500 GB internal drive, took exactly 3 hours.

If anyone has any suggestions on optimal cloning settings, I would love your input.

Thanks for your help hatter...you score again.

Reply

Answer 10

Jan 15, 2011 11:38 PM in response to The hatter

Would Paragon work for backing-up/cloning a Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Bootcamp?

Details:
My internal drive is corrupt and I need to re-install OSX to fix problems with the SMC. I don't want to re-install Windows, all of my programs, and all of the tweaking I've done to it. Would Paragon let me back up my Windows partition, and clone it over to a new BC partition once I've re-installed OSX?

27" iMac (mid 2010) running OSX 10.6.6

Edit: Fixed Model and OS to be correct

Reply

Answer 11

rt2 Author

Level 1

110 points

Jan 16, 2011 5:55 AM in response to Tyler Wall

I don't know for sure, but I believe I saw a version of the software for x64. Check out their website.

Reply

Answer 12

The hatter

Level 9

61,001 points

Jan 16, 2011 9:24 AM in response to rt2

All current Paragon products are "universal" install for 32/64-bit.

Reply