how to clone a hard drive

paddyrg

Treat it as an opportunity to rebuild your computer and start afresh with your operating system install - why inherit all the old crap when you could have happy clean fresh

Strictly speaking a clone of the drive will be the same size as the drive you're replacing, by the way ;-)

devizes18193

thanks all

DVardysShadow

googler wrote: »

Why won't a simple copy/paste work?

because there are some things on a hard drive which are neither files nor directories and there are other things which copy and paste will not touch

it used to be the case that if you copied over or installed the boot sector, you could copy and paste the rest [eg win98], but it is probably less straightforward now.

Hammyman

devizes18193 wrote: »

Its on a laptop but I'll give it a clonezilla a try. I know I could reinstall windows etc but was looking for a way that was automatic in nature as im feeling lazy .

Clonezilla is command line based and refers to drives using Unix drive paths, i.e /dev/sda1

Go to the manufacturers website (either for existing or new drive) and download their own tools. If you've a desktop computer, you can put the laptop drives in that to clone it assuming SATA interfaces on all.

sharkie

devizes18193 wrote: »

Its on a laptop...

We are not finished with you yet.

Since it is a laptop, you will also either need a usb disk with enough free space to store the old hdd image, OR one of these below to do direct 1 to 1 copies.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?moduleno=222999
http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?moduleno=226653
http://www.usbnow.co.uk/Hard_Drive_Enclosures-IDE_&_SATA_Cable_Kits/c10_70/p52/USB_2.0_IDE_&_SATA_Cable_%28with_Power_Supply%29/product_info.html

ebay is cheaper and there also is a usb3 option also available, if you are planing to go down that road. I have something similar to the last one here - it is cheap versatile and really handy paid £8 on ebay

fwor

Hammyman wrote: »

Clonezilla is command line based and refers to drives using Unix drive paths, i.e /dev/sda1

Perhaps Clonezilla used to be command line only, but it's not now - it's a menu-based frontend to a series of other utilities (such as Partclone and Partimage), removing the need to use the command line.

Although it does use Unix/Linux device names, it also displays a whole lot more data about the drive - including its serial number (assuming that the maker of the drive has designed it to report that) and a summary of the partitions already on it. This makes it a lot easier to use than some alternatives. For example I tried to use Clone Genius, which just reports the make and size of drive. As both my source and destination drives are the same make and size, this made it useless, as you can't tell where you are backing up from and to.

Hammyman wrote: »

Go to the manufacturers website (either for existing or new drive) and download their own tools. If you've a desktop computer, you can put the laptop drives in that to clone it assuming SATA interfaces on all.

Agreed - if they have a tool, it will probably be a bit easier to use than Clonezilla.

Toxteth_OGrady

Macrium Reflect Free

Easeus Todo Backup

Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Advanced Edition

DriveImageXML

Dan22

Macrium Reflect Free is very simple, does most work for you.

Toxteth_OGrady

Dan22 wrote: »

Macrium Reflect Free is very simple, does most work for you.

Agreed. Having used many back up strategies over the years I now stick with the Macrium paid version. Does everything I need.

:cool:

TOG

AlwaysSomething

Have just bought a 500Gb drive to replace the 160Gb drive in my laptop. Plan to clone the exisitng drive to the new drive (I'm currently running Vista), then add a fresh install of Win 7 into the remaining space. Will try to work with Win 7 from here on, but it will be handy to be able to boot back in to Vista if I need a password for some website I seldom visit for example.
Anybody got any wisdom or pitfalls to advise me of? For info, I don't have a CD drive on this laptop, so everything has to be USB, including the Win 7 install.
Thanks