Trying to install a new hdd from recovery drive, windows 8

gtrspctr

Honorable
Sep 7, 2013
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10,510
My computer is warning me of an imminent failure of my current hard drive, so I got a new one. Have a 1tb external HDD and first I made a system image, but I couldn't boot my computer with that. Just gave me the Can't Detect Boot Drive error. So then I made it a recovery drive, making sure to copy the recovery partition onto it. Turned off the computer, connected new HDD, and made sure USB drive was plugged in. Set the BIOS to boot USB first, turned on computer. Computer asked me to choose keyboard layout and after choosing US it asked whether I wanted to troubleshoot or turn off pc. Clicked troubleshoot, tried to use Recovery Manager (not sure if that's an HP brand-only feature), I had no options other than Contact HP Support, so I clicked that and I pretty much could only go Back or Finish. So I finished and the pc restarted. Tried doing System Refresh and I can't remember exactly what happened, but I couldn't accomplish anything meaningful with that, nor with any other options. Clicked System Reset, but I didn't want to risk deleting my restore drive. So I turned it off, plugged old HDD drive back in, and here we are. Any advice on how to copy everything onto a new HDD?
 
The best way is to either buy another SATA cable and connect both drives simultaneously or buy a SATA to USB adapter. Then you can use a specialized software to clone the disk. If you have the USB flash drive, try livebooting Linux to it and using clonezilla to copy the drive.