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Possible Duplicate:
What utility can move my Windows boot partition over to another hard drive?

What I have:

  • 1 Laptop w/ vista and failing hard-drive. (only 1 drive bay)
  • 1 Brand new replacement hard-drive
  • 1 external usb hard-drive w/ empty space greater than the capacity of failing drive.

How can I clone the contents of the old hard-drive to the new one?

Community
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Curtis Cook
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2 Answers2

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You can use CloneZilla to do a 1:1 clone of your hard drive. You would have to leave the source drive plugged in, and then attach a second drive (either your external drive with a dedicated partition, or your new drive if you have the proper cables). Run the utility (which is a LiveCD), and you'll be good to go.

CloneZilla does work with Disk-to-Image: CloneZilla Disk-to-Image screenshot

If you do use the external hard drive, you will have to actually run CloneZilla twice. The first would be to clone the hard drive to the external drive, and the second would be to then clone that partition that's on the external onto the new hard drive.

Kruug
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  • Under the run twice scenario, would I have to partition the external drive or could the clone just be saved as an image or something? – Curtis Cook Jan 16 '13 at 21:15
  • I have never really looked, but looking at their screenshots, it appears that you can create an image: http://clonezilla.org/screenshots/?op=show&filepath=./album//00_Clonezilla/07_clonezilla-live-image-or-onthefly.png – Kruug Jan 16 '13 at 21:18
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    Took several hours of re-running it with trial and error to get a writable image from the failing hard-drive, but once I got a working image, I had windows up and running in under ten minutes. Sweet. – Curtis Cook Jan 17 '13 at 21:01
  • Glad it worked for you! Sounds like you did it just in time. – Kruug Jan 17 '13 at 21:10
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Symantec Sytem Recovery will do this easily. It even restores to different hardware. System Recovery Desktop Edition has an eval version. I have used this many times for systems with complex software installs. This has saved me many hours over the past few years.

Dave M
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