Review by Chuck Pearson

If a review is totally positive, reads like advertising copy, and the reviewer has no other Amazon reviews, it is likely that it is a fake review, written by an employee of the company or one of his friends.

I wanted to clone my old hard drive to my new, larger hard drive. I downloaded the free version of True Image, found that it didn’t do clones, and went to Amazon to buy the full version. When I saw the many negative reviews and many fake positive reviews I uninstalled it, using the secret uninstaller referenced in one of the reviews. Then I tried to clone with Clonezilla, Easeusa, and Roadkil rawcopy. I was unsuccessful with all of them. I considered Macrium but it is more expensive and isn’t sold on Amazon so the sample size of users was small. The average rating for Norton Ghost and True Image 2009 wasn’t any better than for this program, although there weren’t so many fake reviews. Out of desperation I ended up ordering this.

I installed it, created a boot diskette which both boots and contains the entire True Image program, and turned off the laptop. Then I put the old hard drive in a USB enclosure, the new hard drive in the laptop, and booted from the boot CD. I followed directions for a manual clone, expanding my C partition as much as possible and minimizing the sizes of my D partition and some other partition. The program initially suggests proportional cloning. When you change the size of a partition to smaller than what is suggested, that space becomes unallocated. It does not become available to the partition that you want to maximize the size of. The clone operation for an 80 GB old drive to a 325 GB new hard drive finished in about half an hour and I proceeded to boot up the computer. I then ejected the boot CD and turned the system off. Then I disconnected the USB drive and rebooted. The system works and the C partition is much bigger, although 80 GB of unallocated space is missing. My next step will be to use a partition program to try to add that to the C partition. I will also try to delete the backup partition since I don’t use it.

I do not plan to use this program for backups. My data is backed up daily on-line and if my hard drive crashes I will just have to reinstall my programs.

In summary, this is a 5 star rating for cloning only, from a boot disc only. I know nothing about the other capabilities of the program and don’t plan to find out. The operation was done on a 2006 Dell Inspiron E1505 Media Center edition Windows XP SP3.