clone two hard drives into one

[Gman86]

To all gurus,
i wish to upgrade my two 160gb drives and clone them onto one 1tb drive. the drives contain no os but there are programs and games spread across both drives. can i clone them onto the new drive and remove the active partitions so i get 1 drive with one active partition?

 

[ArtPog]

There's no problem cloning each of the 160 GB disks to a 1 TB HDD, however they would have to occupy separate partitions as a result of the disk-cloning operation. You could merge them into a single partition but you would need a third-party partition management program to do so. And AFAIK, only the commercial versions of those programs possess that capability; at least I'm not aware of any "freebies" having that capability but I suppose you could do a Google search to see if one exists.

 

[CountMike]

Why clone ??? It should be enough to connect drives one by one or both and copy everything at once or part by part. Cloning does same thing and takes same time.
In Explorer, right click on a drive/partition and copy, right click on destination disk and paste. As simple as that.

 

[Gman86]

sorry im kind of new to the pc experience, i just assumed that cloning would be the safest way of making sure the programs and games would work on the new drive are you saying i could just copy and paste to the new drive?

 

[CountMike]

Only system files of OS/system drives can't be just copied across. Data is not a problem. You can even make 2 partitions on new drive, copy files to those partitions and give them same letters as they had when they were separate disks. That way OS would be none the wiser whether they are on same physical disk or a partition.

 

[ZippyPeanut]

If you want to exactly replicate these drives, then, yes, cloning is "the safest way of making sure the programs and games would work on the new drive." I do not know how to clone two drives onto one partition. But look closely at the paid version of Macrium Reflect home-user edition, which might be able to do what you want.

 

[CountMike]

It's also possible to merge those two copied/cloned partitions into one after it's done.

 

[USAFRet]

I Would like to clone 2 different windows installed hdd into larger one hdd. Each one on separate partition. Is it possible?

Please start a NEW thread for your particular situation.

Yours is different from theirs, and times have changed.