Are you planning to buy a new computer, or upgrade the existing computer’s hard disk at some point? If your answer is “YES” then, this article is meant for you.

In both the cases, you will have to reinstall the operating system on a new hard drive, or the existing hard drive. This would mean reinstalling all your software, and redoing all your personal configurations again.

Programs that were installed on the old hard drive will not work on a new operating system because, the registry, where the operating system stores the information necessary to run any installed programs, will be new and will not contain information that they need to work. Under these circumstances, you can either clone your hard drive, or create a disk image of your hard drive.

Cloning is a process in which, every bit of data from the source hard drive is copied sector by sector, onto a new hard drive. It is a bit-by-bit mirror image of everything on the old hard drive, which is transferred onto a new hard drive. Cloning is possible only if you have a hard drive which is of the same or greater capacity than the source hard drive.

On the contrary, if you don’t have a spare hard drive, you can still create a copy of the existing hard drive, by creating a disk image. In disk imaging, all the data in the source hard drive is copied onto a single file. The file that is created contains complete contents and structure of the data storage medium or device. The image file that is created can easily be copied onto a different hard drive.

It is much easier and time saving, to create a disk image, than to go for a cloning process. REMO Recover (Windows) Pro Edition lets you create a disk image, and recover data from the disk image, using some simple steps.

Note: It is suggested that you disconnect the hard drive from your PC, and connect it to a PC, where the REMO Recover (Windows) Pro Edition software has been installed. You can use this PC, to create a disk image, and to recover data from the disk image that has been created.

Follow the steps given on this page  to create an image of your hard drive using REMO Recover (Windows) Pro Edition software.

Step 1: Launch REMO Recover (Windows) Pro Edition software from the programs menu or by double clicking the desktop icon. The main window pops up as shown in figure a.

Figure a: Main window

Step 2: Click on the Recover-Advanced button to open a new window, as shown in figure b. Select the NTFS Partition Recovery option, to proceed to the next step.

Figure b: NTFS Partition Recovery Selection

Step 3: Now, click the button, to launch the application wizard.Select the Create Disk Image option and click the Next button, to proceed to the subsequent steps, as shown in figure c.

Figure c: Wizard window

Step 4: As you click the Next button, a window displays all the physical drives connected to the PC. Select the physical drive, whose image you want to take, and set the destination path of the drive, where you want to save the image file. Click on the Finish button to start the imaging process as shown in Figure d.

Figure d: Select source and destination

The application will now start creating the image file, and the imaging process window with the progress bar, appears, as shown in Figure e.

Figure e:Disk  Image process window

After the  imaging process is complete, a pop up message intimates process completion and all the activities performed during imaging process is entered in the process log for further reference.

The image file will be stored at the destination specified by you, with the extension “.dd2″..

Tags: clone drive software, disk cloning utility, disk imaging software, drive cloning software, hard drive cloning, hard drive image utility