StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Anybody have a spare one of these and wants to give me a Christmas present? It looks like something you can stuff in an envelope and mail over.

If you want I could paypal ten bucks too, but if you've got a spare one I'd gladly pay for a stamp. It looks like something worth a dollar that computer guys and hobbyists have all over the place but is overpriced if you try buying it. Not to mention I tried buying it, and I got fast-talked into getting a USB enclosure instead. Which doesn't work except with special drivers and I can't install Windows to. My laptop has no optical drive and no floppy drive and I don't have the media center which the laptop attaches to so my only option is to hook the hard drive up to a desktop like this.

Also, I need disk imaging software. A no frills kind, workable with a bootable cd or bootable floppy. Free if possible, but I'm willing to pay. Reliable too. I don't care if it's slow, I'm not trying to image every day.

Also if you happen to know anywhere I can get a cheap 2.5 inch hard drive, I wouldn't mind being directed. Bigger is better.

If you're willing to use Paypal, you might just want to get this.

It's close enough to you that you could probably just go pick it up.

You can usually buy simple PC-board converters from electronics hobby stores: they're AU$5 around here. You're right, they're much more useful than the USB enclosure things.

Software wise, after screwing around with various programs I settled on Acronis True Image 10.
The program's US$31 downloaded from newegg, but it's 'damn well worth it' in the words of the old Curtis-Mathis TV ads.
The only drawback is that in the current release, you can't burn the images directly to a bootable DVD, but it does file split into CD or DVD sized chunks and you can make a bootable CD rescue disk that you can use to restore from.

It'll restore a 10GB XP/applications install in less than 10 minutes when booting from the CD and restoring from an image file located on a second hard drive, and in under 20 minutes when doing it from a laptop drive in a USB enclosure.

This has been a life saver so many times it's worth double what I paid for it. It's actually paid for it's self a few times over.

Though this one will do sata drives too. no need to mess with opening cases or anything. Only reason I'd get the one you've pointed out is if i was going to leave that hard drive in that machine.

As for back up imaging software there's "PING" - Partition Image is Not Ghost, it's free and more info can be found here.

I've had several successes with DriveImage XML.

Thanks for the replies peeps, I'm probably going to go with DA's solution and buy one of those converters. As for the disk imaging software, I'll hold off and tell you how it goes later - Brian.