copying Hard Drive To DVDs? Plz Help

[RajivKumar123456]

I want to Copy my Hard Drive to optical media (such as DVDs). I want to copy every bit of information (even EMPTY clusters & sectors). I have deleted some files from the hard drive and am planning to recover them later. Can I COPY Hard Drive to DVDs (including empty clusters & sectors). Which software to use and how to do this? plz help immediately!

[aditya1987]

Norton Ghost will do it for you.

[ThinkFree]

Norton Ghost/Acronis trueimage will help

[RajivKumar123456]

Thanx Aditya & ThinkFree! BUT I have already tried these softwares but can't understand how to do this job (in Norton Ghost) please GIVE me appropriate tutorial on doing this. AND if you gonna suggest any software ONLY suggest FREEWARE & Light weight (because I'm a dial-up user) OR any software available on Digit Disks.

[dheeraj_kumar]

You need 2 hard disks if you want to do that.

[Most Wanted]

^^hey, he want backup on optical media such DVD. Buying a new hdd may be more costly than DVD. I think ghost is best for this.

[paroh]

Acronis.True.Image can do this but as u said u want to make backup of even the even EMPTY clusters & sectors by this if u have 20GB hard disk the image will be also of 20GB containg also the clusters and sectors

[dheeraj_kumar]

^^ Read his question again. He wants to backup every byte in his HD. So his backup file would be the size of a hard disk. Where would he store it? in another hard disk, of course.

[ThinkFree]

^^But still buying DVDs would be cheaper(though very time consuming) than buying a separate hard disk.

[dheeraj_kumar]

^^ True, but How would he write each byte directly to the DVD, without making a seperate file? Thats impossible, every burning software needs some sort of buffer to read from. When you're taking backup of the whole drive, you dont have any space for buffer.

[ThinkFree]

See if these help
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/...-norton-ghost/
http://www.macrium.com/blog/2008/03/...umReflect.aspx

[dheeraj_kumar]

^^ I dont think they would, because:

1. "I want to copy every bit of information (even EMPTY clusters & sectors)." Nope, this doesnt.
2. "I’d advice you to create another partition (E: drive) to save the backup image." You need a place for the backup.

[din]

Originally Posted by RajivKumar123456

ONLY suggest FREEWARE & Light weight (because I'm a dial-up user) OR any software available on Digit Disks.

Whatabout DriveImage XML

[ThinkFree]

Originally Posted by dheeraj_kumar

^^ I dont think they would, because:

1. "I want to copy every bit of information (even EMPTY clusters & sectors)." Nope, this doesnt.
2. "I’d advice you to create another partition (E: drive) to save the backup image." You need a place for the backup.

Yes, it doesn't copy every sector but backup can be saved on discs

Reflect can store images on one or many DVDs but it is far better to choose a local or network drive. By using a local or network drive you can easily access your image files for restoring and you can browse your images in Windows explorer. This isn’t possible if the image file spans more than one DVD.

[dheeraj_kumar]

Yeah, I saw that. Anyway, its OP's call. Let him choose