Posted: 3/28/2014 8:22:58 AM EDT
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The main hard drive in my PC is almost out of space, is getting old and indicates it's starting to fail (blue screen every month or so, weird noises, chkdsk finds bad sectors, etc....), so I bought an installed (successfully) a much larger internal hard drive a few months ago. I also have all my data stored on an external drive, so my data is safe. The new drive is twice as big and still sitting empty. I would like to use the new bigger drive as the main drive, so can I clone the original drive to the new one, shut it down, swap the plugs and go? If I do this, will the computer recognize the newer drive since it's a clone? If this works, then I would reformat the old drive and use it as a backup/storage drive.
ETA: sorry, I see there's an 'urban commando' section and there's no 'delete' option for me to nuke this and move it. |
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Reflect is free and works great. |
Create 2 partitions on your new drive. The first one will be for your OS and the 2nd one is where you move all of your data to. After all of the data is on the 2nd partition, power down, remove old drive and swap wires. Then power up and install the OS on the 1st partition. Reinstall all apps. Good to go.
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Norton Ghost FTW! (or is it Symantec these days). Or if you are handy with Linux, you can do a dd copy.
Alternatively you can do an image backup of your old drive, and restore it to the new drive once done. I don't usually trust the Windows built in software to do it right though, especially when restoring programs. |
| Most of the major HD makers have free cloning tools, but you have to use their drive- the program checks for certain electronic signatures that it recognizes as a "my kind" of hardware. I have excellent success with Acronis True Image and it works fine even if drive A is brand X and drive B is brand Y. |
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I would not clone your failing hard drive. If your data is safe do a fresh install and move your data over.
If you clone a drive that has had issues and you see them manifest due to blue screens, that means the data has become corrupt. Imaging/cloning software will just copy over the corrupt files. You will end up with a healthy hard drive with bad O/S files on it. I work for Seagate and I see people do this all the time. It normally doesn't end well. The best time to make an image of your computer is before it has problems. |
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Quoted:
I would not clone your failing hard drive. If your data is safe do a fresh install and move your data over. If you clone a drive that has had issues and you see them manifest due to blue screens, that means the data has become corrupt. Imaging/cloning software will just copy over the corrupt files. You will end up with a healthy hard drive with bad O/S files on it. Good point, didn't catch that part, stopped at "its running out of space." OP, remove old hard drive, install new one. Install fresh copy of window. Hook up old drive via a SATA to USB adapter, or connect directly to computer motherboard. Copy data from within "olddrive:\users\youruserprofile" to C:\users\youruserprofile. If you have any data in the root directory, copy that over too, but you should not be storing data there. You'll have to re-install your programs, no reliable way to copy most over. |
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Quoted: I would not clone your failing hard drive. If your data is safe do a fresh install and move your data over. If you clone a drive that has had issues and you see them manifest due to blue screens, that means the data has become corrupt. Imaging/cloning software will just copy over the corrupt files. You will end up with a healthy hard drive with bad O/S files on it. I work for Seagate and I see people do this all the time. It normally doesn't end well. The best time to make an image of your computer is before it has problems. +1
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After getting a hold of some friends that are quite versed in this stuff and do it professionally, I was pretty confident the issues I had with the old drive were hardware related. My hard drive would click and make odd noises, and it was almost out of space. I ended up cloning the new drive,made sure it was partitioned correctly, pulled them both out and put the new drive in the original bay. Now it now works quite well and is quicker. The new drive is less than half full now too.
I understand the concern with cloning bad data (as was posted above), and I'll keep an eye out for anything that's not normal. Frankly, I've reformatted and re-installed all my programs before, and I'm just not going to spend 6 hours doing that again if I don't have to. It's a calculated risk on my part, and I'm willing to deal with the consequences. I'm now reformatting the original drive, but I may decide to just toss it. Thanks for the information. |
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dd if=somedisk of=somedisk ETA: might need to throw a bs=bytesize in there, I don't recall having to do that last time I did a dd though. This has the potential for much hilarity. A few years ago, I convinced a 1 TB drive that it was only a 60 GB drive. Whoopsie. I can't recall how I eventually fixed it - probably involved use of Gparted. dd is like a force of nature. It will smack you down hard if you don't know exactly what you're doing. |