My laptop is on the fritz (again) and I need to back up the entire contents of the HD (60 gigs, OS and all) before sending it in for warranty repair/replacement… assuming I can keep it alive long enough to do so.
It doesn’t have a DVD burner but I can send the files over my home network and burn them there.
Suggestions for freeware software to accomplish this? Doesn’t need to be Windows, or really anything, so long as I can boot from it and connect to the network.
What you’re looking for is called “disk imaging” software, and I don’t know of any free versions (doesn’t mean that there’s not any out there). I’ve used a commercial version in the past, but danged if I can remember what it’s name is, other than it began with an “A.” You might try Spinrite to see if it can solve your HDD problems, or at least keep it going long enough for you to get everything backed up.
You will have to be able to run a Linux command line and to understand partitions, file systems, and whatnot fairly well to be able to use it though. If that’s alright, then it looks like you’ll want to use partimage to create the image file. But from there, it will take some mucking around to see how and if you can mount your desktop as a network drive so that you have somewhere to save the image file out to.
If you can’t, then you can try saving the image file on laptop itself if you can create another partition (there’s a tool to shrink an NTFS partition in RIP (if it doesn’t trash it)) in ext2 or FAT32 or something. Then you can FTP over to your desktop. To get an FTP server running on your desktop, I would recommend CrossFTP which is amazingly easy to get up and running (if you have Java installed.)
I used the freeware version of MiRay’s HDClone several months ago. Hard drive was failing, Spinright didn’t help, copied entire drive to larger one - no more problems. HDClone worked great and had clear, complete instructions, too.
If you copy the entire drive over can the USB HDD later be used to copy the information back to the computer’s drive and everything will work just as it was?
Not if you do a regular copy/paste. A regular copy/paste may back up your data when you copy it back to the new drive, but it won’t restore the Operating System. To back up the Operating System you need drive imaging software as listed above.
I agree with Tuckerfan that Spinrite might be the solution. I have it and have used it on occasion when I had HD problems. It reformats your HD without losing any data. It is great.