New L702X coming, is it possible to image HDD?

I have my 4th L702X coming finally, hopefully its exactly what I ordered this time......... anyway I have noticed that the other L702X laptops I had goes through these bootup rituals when they get turned on for the first time and I was wondering if its possible to remove the C: drive and make an EXACT MIRROR image onto another HDD (using my desktop computer) and just keep the original L702X in a safe place if I ever have a problem. If so, how can this be done?

Thanks in advance

 

You could always take out the drive and put it on your desktop, then make an image from there. That way you wouldn't even have to do it offline, unlike how you're normally forced to sit and twiddle your thumbs for a few hours.

 

yes yes, exactly, thats exactly what I want to do, image it from my desktop BEFORE first bootup. Is that possible? Would'nt I need a program that can copy it exactly for this to work?

 

I put mine in an external esata and used my other laptop to image it with macrium reflect software...its free for a little while. It was super fast to, only took a matter of minutes.
Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

 

OK, cool, thanks for that. I'll definitely try it. When you used this program, did it copy all the hidden partitions too?

I was fooling around with this L702X that I have to send back when my new one shows up and even though there is no restore folder on the C: drive there is a hidden restore if you type F8 on boot up and it restored it. So I guess that means all I need to do is image the whole drive including the hidden partitions and I should be happy.

On another note, has anyone upgraded their HDD to the WD black SCORPIO 750GB 7200 rpm and what do they think about it compared to the stock seagates?

 

Another good imaging option is CloneZilla ( http://clonezilla.org/), which is free and open-source software. It's what I use for imaging. You burn the software to CD then boot from the CD, so you can do this before booting to your windows partition for the first time. This way you don't need to have an external hard drive enclosure or worry about taking your HDD out of your laptop.

Easiest thing to do is connect an external drive to your laptop, boot to the CloneZilla CD and image to the external drive. You can also image to a windows share if you don't have an external drive available.

 

I can second this as well I used clonezilla when I had to copy one almost full 500gb to another....the first was dying....I've only used it however when copying drives internally....

But yes the macrium backed up the entire used portion of the drive, you don't have to deal with partitions etc, you can select the entire drive....basically ~20Gb, again I imaged it before I ever turned it on.

The only hangup with the macrium might be what sort of image or file type your wanting to end up with....iel .ios, a folder or some proprietary image format

 

Well if you're going to take the drive out... you could always just swap it with the drive in the new one, though I guess you don't want to risk damaging the new one if you don't have to.

 

Hello all, thx for all the help, let me clarify a bit here, I'm not swapping drives in two of the L702X's

All I want to do is to replace the original drive in the one I end up keeping with a new XT drive I bought for only 100 bucks. This will allow me to keep the original in the desk drawer if I ever run into problems with the hybrid XT

I ended up getting the seagate 500 GB momentus xt hybrid with an extended 3 yr over the counter replacement warranty for obvious reasons because I was reading people either LOVE the drive or HATE it so I wanted to make sure I got a good one and if I didnt I could keep trying until I get a good one. This one was manufactured 05/11 so its the latest.

 

Since laptop drives are so cheap I just pull the OEM one and store it somewhere. Imaging it isn't a bad idea as long as you don't lose the image.

 

well in that case i would go with clonezilla, just get the cd burned before hand and when you finally get the system you want to keep install the XT as secondary and when you first boot up make sure and boot the clonezilla live cd and image the OEM drive to your XT then swap them and boot....should work