Operating Environment
A disk cloning program needs to be able to read even protected operating system files on the source disk, and must guarantee that the system is in a consistent state at the time of reading. It must also overwrite any operating system already present on the destination disk. To simplify these tasks, most disk cloning programs can run under an operating system different from the native operating system of the host computer, for example, MS-DOS or an equivalent such as PC-DOS or DR-DOS, or Linux. The computer is booted from this operating system, the cloning program is loaded and copies the Windows file system. Many programs (e.g. Acronis True Image) can clone a disk, or make an image, from within Windows, with special provision for copying open files; but an image cannot be restored onto the Windows System Drive under Windows.
A disc cloning program running under non-Windows operating systems must have device drivers or equivalent for all devices used. The manufacturers of some devices do not provide suitable drivers, so the manufacturers of disk cloning software must write their own drivers, or include device access functionality in some other way. This applies to tape drives, CD and DVD readers and writers, and USB and FireWire drives. Cloning software contains its own TCP/IP stack for multicast transfer of data where required.
Read more about this topic: Disk Cloning
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