How to Duplicating/clone a HDD?

joe159540

Posts: 25   +0
Hello,
Im getting a new SSD and I have a old pc with a 64 bit OS that I want to clone onto the SSD so I can get the computer loaded faster. I'm looking for a free and easy way to clone ALL the data on a HDD and make it able to be booted from if I was to plug it into my motherboard and select it as my default boot drive.
Thanks
:-D
 
There any many free options out there for cloning your hard drive.
Some available downloads are:
Clonezilla
Macrium Reflect
MiniTool Partition Wizard

I personally like the MiniTool Partition Wizard. Have used this many times and every time it just works. No problems of any kind (at least from my personal experiences).
Thanks for the quick reponse with the list with more than one option if one doesn't work.
Just a question does any of them have a formatting part of it? or is windows right click format okay for wiping the HDD if it goes wrong?
Thank-You!
 
A hard drive copy station is about the easiest way. It would only work though if the SSD storage capacity was the same size or larger than the drive you are cloning.
 
MiniTool Partition Wizard does a lot more then just Clone Hard Drives. It creates, deletes, aligns, moves, resizes, recovers, splits, joins, hides, copies, and converts partitions or entire disks. It can change drive letters, label partitions and volumes, edit properties, and check file systems.
You can use the built in Format that is included with Windows though (if you want to use it).
 
A hard drive copy station is about the easiest way. It would only work though if the SSD storage capacity was the same size or larger than the drive you are cloning.
Does that mean if I was copy 70Gb of storage from a 250Gb HDD to a 120Gb SSD it wouldnt work?
 
Unfortunately you can't choose parts/partitions on the disk to clone so it wouldn't be any use for that. The copy station copies over the whole disk. You bang in the two disks, press a button and in maybe 45mins you have a duplicate hard drive ready to go. If the new/destination disk is bigger in size you can reclaim the extra space afterwards with software.
 
There any many free options out there for cloning your hard drive.
Some available downloads are:
Clonezilla
Macrium Reflect
MiniTool Partition Wizard

I personally like the MiniTool Partition Wizard. Have used this many times and every time it just works. No problems of any kind (at least from my personal experiences).
I like this for most situations. I have a couple of hard drives with odd OS mixes (Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Gentoo Linux, Suse Linux, Solaris, LFS and Minix). The best way to clone this drive in the past has been to clone the partition table with Linux's "partimage", then with both the old and new drives attached but not mounted (on any old computer) transfer the file systems with "dd". If you are resizing, using the most recent version of GNU "tar" piped to a second copy of "tar" works almost as well (but in this case, install the new file system and mount the source and destination partitions before running tar).

The last resort for the partition that doesn't boot (that seems to be the most likely problem) is to reinstall that one OS. I'm upgrading to a 2 TB hard drive on my trusty old Latitude E6500, so that drive is going to get cloned again -- and I don't think it will be pleasant....
 
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