Alienware R7 Aurora Clone

[smscott28]

I just got my new alienware aurora r7 and want to clone the drive before ever first booting it. I know from this being replaced after another brand new one I bought that once I need to reload windows I loose all the original boot partitions and setup. What I’m looking at doing is buying a inatech fd2002 cloner and a seagate ironwolf pro 2tb drive to clone to since my original drive is 1tb (I know from reading and talking to cloning companies the new drive needs to be the same or larger. Is there anything I should know before doing a standalone cloning?

 

[ArtPog]

1. First of all it is unnecessary that the destination drive, i.e., the recipient of the clone, needs to be the same size or larger size than the source drive, i.e., the drive you will be cloning. The crucial requirement is that the destinatation drive be large enough to contain the total data contents of the source drive. Since you will be cloning a 1 TB drive there is no absolute need for the destination drive to be larger than 1 TB. (And it even could be smaller depending upon the total data on the source drive.) Now, if for some reason you would prefer a larger capacity destination drive - perhaps for future considerations - there would be no objection to your purchasing such. Capiche?

2. Since you're working with a desktop PC you would have available another SATA data connection to which you could install the destination drive and clone the contents of the source drive to the destination drive that way. There would be no need to use a docking station or other USB-connected external drive to accomplish the disk-cloning operation.

3. You could use one of the many freely-available cloning programs, e.g, Macrium Reflect or EaseUS Todo, or a slew of others.

4. If you choose to use an external USB device to do so there's nothing inherently wrong with that technique. You might prefer it because the clone would be separated from the PC. It's your choice.