Jan132011

How can I clone a hard drive?

Mike Maulbeck asks:

So I upgraded my crappy PC to a gaming PC about 5 or 6 months ago. Now with the holiday steam sales and general game buying, I have run out of hard drive space, so I got a nice 1TB hard drive which should last me to infinity and beyond.

However, I need to know how to clone my old hard drive’s content onto the new one, operating system and all. I’ve heard some stuff about losing windows activation and things and I want to make sure I don’t mess anything up. Can I just copy all the files over or what?


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  • Steward March 3, 2011

    i vote for todo backup free as smallant456 said.
    clone is easier than any other way to do this. If you cloned the system located hard drive, you can get a new one with system reserved and all original applications installed.
    BTW, this guided me with an ease, may it helpful ;D
    http://www.todo-backup.com/products/features/disk-clone-guide.htm

  • smallant456 January 20, 2011

    Maybe you can choose two way. You can backup the system partition and other important partitions to a image on the old drive and after you connect the new drive to your computer, you can restore the image to the new one;
    Another way, you can clone the old drive to the new one and take the old one away, starting computer from the new drive, that’s ok.
    For all the operations, you need a software to help you. Here i would like to recommend you a freeware i have used: todo backup software.
    http://www.todo-backup.com/

  • Jean January 15, 2011

    I suggest you use Partition Assistant, it’s new updated version can clone the partition.
    See more: partition manager software.

  • FIDELIS January 15, 2011

    You can use pcmover pro. Here is the link:

    http://www.laplink.com/pcmover/pcmoverpro.html

  • Gmnelson2009 January 14, 2011

    you can also use ¨Macrium Reflect¨ (free) to create an image of your old disk to an external drive, create a rescue cd, then you install your new disk, format and set partition sizes (for this you can use ¨Partition Wizard Home¨ (also free) from the boot disk that it lets you make), then boot from the rescue cd of Macrium and restore all partition images to the new disk.

  • Anonymous January 14, 2011

    Hi
    Well if you partition your second hard drive then you can make an image of your windows to one partition, then you can upload the image to the second partition and you will have the windows back again.

    For imaging you can use
    DriveImage XML
    http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

    Clonezilla
    http://clonezilla.org/
    guide http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-clone-hard-drives-clonezilla

    Acronis true image

    also you can use windows backup and restore center.
    Its seems that all you need to do is select the “create system image option”, target it to some external drive. Then using the utility create a rescue disc (DVD). you can then boot from this DVD and restore the entire system drive image to a new HDD.
    http://www.pagestart.com/win7bckuprstrnhd072610.html

    to transfert files
    PCmover
    http://www.laplink.com/pcmover/

  • Sonny Bass January 14, 2011

    I have had very good luck using Clonezilla Live. It is free. Visit distrowatch.com You can download it and many other useful items such as dban, Parted Magic, and any flavor Linux you might want to try.

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