Maxblast - anyone use it?

I have been using Maxblast 5 quite happily to create image backups of my system disc to my external USB drive, although I had never tested the image restore.

I bought a bigger hard drive with the intention of replacing my existing C drive. I know the easiest way to do this is to use the clone facility, but I had read of someone who did this and ended up with his original and the cloned disk as unbootable, so this put me off.

Therefore I thought I would use the image restore to make my new bigger drive into the system disc, thus also testing out the image restore to ensure it worked in the event of it being required.

Before dismantling the computer and putting the new drive in, I thought I would go through the steps, but without doing the last one. So I booted my computer using the Maxblast boot CD. When I selected image backup restore, I was presented with a list of drives - removable drives A, B, F, G and H, although expanding those revealed nothing - plus Local discs C, D and E, which I could expand and were evidently my three USB external drives.

I selected my image to restore and continued to the next step, where I can only select 'C' or 'MBR & track 0' - I thought if I wanted to make my new disk bootable I had to select both.

Selecting C and continuing, at the target selection stage, again I only have the USB drives available.

So, can I not see any SATA drives because they are not empty? If so, could I create a new system disc by connecting it as a USB drive and restore to it that way, then swap it with my existing system disc?


Thanks for any help!

whewwwww just CLONE DRIVE USING DiscWizard End User License Agreement | Seagate

I thought Discwizard and Maxblast were the same?

Thanks pacinitaly for the Discwizard suggestion (and for taking the time to read my waffling!). :D

The version of Discwizard I downloaded is obviously a later version than my version of Maxblast and has a slightly different interface, but gave me all the options I was expecting and all disks are visible.

Although, confusingly, using the boot disk it told me I had to have a Seagate or Maxtor disk in the system to use Discwizard - I have got a Maxtor USB drive, but I used the <Alt> T O trick I read about elsewhere to get round that.

The next flaw in my plan is actually connecting the new drive via USB. I am using one of those SATA to USB cables, but when I go into disk management and try to initialize the drive, I get a 'device is not ready' message.

#1 :huh:

#2 I forgot to say to ALL always hold down alt/ T / O (tech override)

pacinitaly said:

#1 :huh:

Click to expand...

Have I still confused you?