Clone one harddrive to another

Mr_Grinch

A friend's harddrive is on the way out, it's constantly failing and will sometimes work for a few days and sometimes fail every five minutes. The harddrive has been checked on another machine and we definitely know it's at fault. I'm hoping to catch it whilst it's working and basically copy everything from it, to another drive as the windows install on it etc is working fine.

What's the best way of doing it? Preferably with freeware stuff. I could just use good 'ole xcopy but I'm not sure if that would copy absolutely everything.

::edit:: I should clarify I've already backed up all his important files to a spare hd I have. This is just a best case scenario, if I can manage to get the harddrive up and running long enough to get a copy.

embrik

There's a whole bunch of free cloning tools on the Ultimate Boot CD. One of them should work for you.

Primesghost

You should be aware that 99% of the time when a drive is failing like that it ends up with bad sectors on the drive. When you clone the drive these sectors are also transferred to the new drive. Now these sectors marked as bad won't actually damage the new drive but it will carry any problems caused by data corruption over to the new drive as well ending with endless hours of frustration trying to fix things. The best solution would be to back up your friend's important data from the old drive and do a clean install on the new one.