Question How To Clone A Hard Drive

goozblahblah

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Jun 22, 2021
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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?
 
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

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Jun 22, 2021
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@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?
 
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

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Jun 22, 2021
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@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?

 
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)