Just now, I needed to duplicate a drive, and so I did Internet research and came up with a nice-looking utility to do it for me. The one I found was free, but there were a whole bunch of super expensive ones (even recommended by PC Magazine). I installed it, fired it up, and found that it would not let me copy the current (OS) drive onto the blank drive I had just inserted. It's apparently not going to let me have cloning access to the OS disk because the files are in use. To use that approach, I would need to boot from a different media and copy that drive to the blank one.
So, I thought of another approach, taking advantage of Windows's awesome RAID capabilities. In Disk Manager (after booting from the drive I wanted to clone), I set the blank disk, which is of the same size, to be a mirror of the OS drive. It's currently "resynching" the RAID-1 arrangement, but when it's done, I'll have a perfect copy of the drive. To make sure the new drive doesn't try to assimilate others that it finds, I will disconnect the RAID when it's finished. Since using Disk Management to remove the mirror would erase the drive, I will reboot the computer physically removing one drive from the machine, open Disk Manager to verify that it says "Missing" for the other drive, and remove the mirror. This will be done again for the new disk.
Once this procedure is complete, I will have a perfect copy of my drive - done without expensive software or a third boot medium.
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