Clone external hard drive into one of the drives in the computer

[allextrastodo]

Hello,

I have an external hard drive with a capacity of 500 GB. It has got some installed software which is around 400 GB. I want to clone this to my computer. My computer has 1TB harddrive with 2 partitions...c and d drives. d drive has 800 GB. How can i clone this external hard drive into d drive?

Thanks a lot in advance

Kumar

 

[WyomingKnott]

It's pretty simple to just copy the data. However, if you are asking about how to copy the software so that it will be runnable, in many cases you can't.

What software is installed on that drive, and how did it get there? Did that used to be your system drive? If so, most software cannot be moved since the installation process makes entries in the registry that won't be in the registry of the system you are moving it to, and may put files in the /windows/system32 tree.

Questions. Is the purpose of the move to get the installed SW to run on the target machine? When it was installed, was this disk part of your current machine, a secondary drive for another OS, or an OS drive? And what software? Some of it is actually portable. Do you have the original distribution if you need to do a re-install?