Question How To Clone A Hard Drive

[goozblahblah]

I have. a laptop that the drive is clicking when booting up, def a bad sign! I am wanting a way to clone this drive to a new drive w/o over working the drive to death.

Should I use something like Macrium Reflect? I know that requires the drive to be powered on and in windows?

Is there a better alternative?

What is my best option here to clone the drive with the least strain on the drive?

 

[faalin]

Is this your main drive in the laptop? Do you have another computer that you could attach it to?

Yes the drive will have to be powered on in order for the clone to happen. Personaly i would use a second computer and put that drive in a caddie along with the drive your cloning to. That way the drive is only being read.

 

[goozblahblah]

@faalin - it is the main drive.

Should I remove the drive and get a SATA to usb connector and connect it to a diff computer?

Or would I need to purchase a USB Extenral Drive and connect the USB external Drive to this comptuer and go that route?

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I would use something like parted magic. It’s basically a Linux distro you can buy for 10-15 bucks, but they’ve got a tool in there with a gui called ddrescue. You have to be careful but I like to tell it to copy the old drive to another one (get one larger than your old one), but have it copy your old drive to the new one, and use the option to NOT retry bad sectors.

With any luck what hopefully will happen is it will finish properly and you can swap the older drive for the newer one and the system will boot normally with the new drive and your data. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to run disk check on it and maybe a defrag if it’s a standard drive just to let the file system try to clean itself up from any errors the old drive had.

 

[goozblahblah]

@ohio_buckeye - is there a for idiots guide on how to use parted magic?

After I clone the drive, does this program also allow me to "restore" the clone onto my new drive?

 

[ohio_buckeye]

The method I use is a disk to disk copy. I put the site below. I don’t know that they have a guide per se, it’s probably geared toward technicians. Other programs may do the same thing.

PartedMagic - Partitioning, Cloning, Rescue, and Erasing.

PartedMagic - Inexpensive and easy to use Disk Partitioning, Disk Cloning, Data Rescue & Recovery, Disk Erasing, and Benchmarking software.

partedmagic.com

 

[goozblahblah]

@ohio_buckeye - i saw the site from a quick google search...still don't fully understand what to do/options to choose etc. :/

I found this, but it's parted magic and clonezilla - does this use clonezilla?

How to clone an HDD using Parted Magic and Clonezilla.

Getting started! Booting Parted Magic from an external device. You will be presented with the Parted Magic boot screen if you have done the previous steps correctly, select the relevant boot options for your machine and boot Parted Magic. 1. First, boot to the bios of the machine

prezi.com

 

[ohio_buckeye]

It has clonezilla, but they have a ddrescue program on there that’s what I’ve used in the past.

 

[goozblahblah]

Think you could list out the steps on using that ddrescue program?

 

[faalin]

you're going to have to pull the drive out to replace it. I would buy one of these plug your bad drive into one slot and the drive your cloning to into the other drive and use Macrium Reflect and clone the drive.

I have a cable matters dual dock station and i use it all the time at work moving OS's from standard hard drives to SSD's, my go to is Macrium Reflect with EaseUS Partition Master second (EaseUS is a paid for program)

 

[goozblahblah]

@faalin - so I would put macrium reflect on a 3rd computer, plug this caddy in then insert the "bad" drive and the "new" drive and it would make a 1 to 1 copy for me from "bad" drive to "new" drive?

 

[faalin]

@faalin - so I would put macrium reflect on a 3rd computer, plug this caddy in then insert the "bad" drive and the "new" drive and it would make a 1 to 1 copy for me from "bad" drive to "new" drive?

Yes