That means you'll need a back-up drive or partition with more free space than the entire capacity of the troublesome drive itself.īackups are stored in the IMG format - these can be browsed using a variety of tools, including higher end versions of HDClone itself. The backup and restore options only work on entire physical drives - you can use it to back up individual partitions - and unlike other tools, HDClone Free doesn't support any form of compression. Use the clone option to upgrade your drive - if (as is likely) your new drive is larger than your old one, HDClone will automatically resize the partitions to fill the extra space. You get three basic options: clone, backup and restore. You will need to install it into a working version of Windows first, but once setup, click Start > All Programs > HDClone 4 Free Edition > Create boot medium to create the CD you can then boot from your malfunctioning PC. However, when it comes to accessing your drive outside of Windows, then HDClone is hard to beat. If you're looking for a tool that works within Windows, choose Macrium. We'll be honest: the free version of HDClone is quite limited.

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