What's the best way to copy a hard drive?

Don't quote me, but I believe that the recovery disk will check what hardware it's being installed on. When an OEM ships a computer, the Windows license is tied permanently to the hard drive it's installed on (I think it's somewhere in the dreaded ELUA), which if true would mean that you can't use the OEM Windows install on a new drive. Correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: Wow, I feel dumb. Just remembered that I used the same OEM activation key and cert to install Windows 7 Pro on the SSD I bought.

 

lol. Thanks for the info.

 

Just a Hard drive dock like one was mentioned earlier, or get an external drive enclosure and make yourself an external hard drive now

 

if u just need the data, u can copy manually.
but if u wanna copy a system disk, u have to use a third-party disk copy tool.
u can learn more from here.

 

As a nervious newbie, I have been reading this thread with interest. I am in the middle of cloning my laptop's hard drive, getting bored waiting while the USB clone process grinds away, so I'll post/report what I've learned so far.

1.) Easiest way to do it, for me, was to buy an external enclosure. I went to Amazon and paid $4.89 for a "2.5" USB 2.0 SATA hard drive HDD case enclosure." Shipping was free with my new 250gb WD Scorpio Black drive.

2.) The new hard drive fit right into the case, and the case included a (short) usb cable which plugged into my laptop.

3.) After plugging the new enclosure's cable into my laptop, a reassuring red light came on in the enclosure and the new drive spun up. (The USB attachment provided the only power source needed for this drive to work.)

4.) In order to get my laptop (which is running Windows XP) to recognize the new drive, I had to "initialize" it. This involves going to START and right-clicking on "MY COMPUTER." Choose "manage," choose "disk management." XP found my new drive, which was easy to identify: the big and empty one. Following that, it was simple to initialize and format the drive, following the clear instructions provided in the XP window. I chose to designate my new drive with a very different letter than "c," so there would be no confusion/doubt which drive I would later choose as my destination clone.

5.) Since my new drive was a Western Digital product, I thought it would be easy to use WD's Acronis True Image Softwareto clone my old hard Samsung laptop drive. Uh, uh. Nope. Doesn't work. Only after a tedious download, and several unsuccessful attempts at installation, did I discover an obscure notation elsewhere on WD's support site that informed me that Acronis doesn't work if you are using an external WD product (like my new Scorpio) in a third-party enclosure. Why the heck couldn't they tell me that at the top of the WD Acronis download page?

6.) Right now, I'm 49 minutes into the process of cloning, using EaseUS Todo Backup. This program (several links in posts above) was totally free to download. It started easily, and it clearly enumerated the steps to clone my old drive.

7.) I was very sure to be sure to choose the right "source drive," (my old one) and the new drive as the "destination" drive." As noted elsewhere in this thread, making any mistake about this detail is very bad news.

8.) So, I wait...I think it will work out just fine, though. EaseUS promises that the Windows clone will reproduce boot sectors and produce a perfect clone. I'll know soon. I hope.

9.) Decided to edit the post with an update: The clone worked! Took almost two hours to transfer 80 gb. Almost flawless, except... a.) some freeware wanted to call home and/or get me to register/pay. I had forgotten who/when/why I ever installed it. It was old and required a registry edit to uninstall; and b.) My old 80gb hard drive on my new 250 gb Scorpio became my NEW 80gb hard drive. The rest of the space was unallocated--even though I thought I had instructed the EaseUS program to add the space to my boot partition. So, I still have to do some partition magic to complete the process. But at least it boots and looks/feels/acts just like my old drive.

 

Don't know if its been mentioned so here you go for freeware: xxclone. I still use this even though it was meant for xp. It still works. Copies one hard drive to another, duplicates the hardware id, and does it all while you still use your operating system. When you boot up in your new hard drive Windows will work like a charm and there won't be a windows genuine advantage crisis on your hands.

Just know that you need to get your hands a little dirty in xxclone's settings to make all that happen, but it's pretty straightforward.

 

OK, now I need my hand held. One poster mentioned Gparted. Anybody use the free NTFS disk management editing utility part of it called ntfsprogs?

My newly cloned 250 gb disk now reports like this in windows Computer Management/Disk Management screen: c: 63.90 gb NTFS, Healthy (system); d: 9.61 gb FAT32, Healthy; the remainder of the disk reports as, 159.37gb NTFS, Healthy (Unkown Partition). In other words, I've temporarily "lost" 159.37 gb of my new drive. What is an easy way to resize c: to include that space? Does xp's disk manager have that capability?

I haven't downloaded ntfsprogs yet. My goal is to end up expanding the 63.90 gb partition on my c: to include the lost 159.37gb. I don't know if ntfsprogs operates from the command line of a boot-dvd--or if it is graphical.

If anybody has experience and advice, I'll be listening. Thanks.

 

Use gparted to delete whatever partition is there, if any. Then expand your active partition to encompass the space by dragging the end bar of the partition or make the space before and after the desired partition to as close to zero as you can get. The gui is fairly friendly. Just do one step at a time, and dont expand the front end of a partition - it moves the data and takes foreverrrr.

 

Received this as a PM for some reason. Posting it here since it'll probably pop up again for someone else:

GParted is front end for the Linux partition editor, and can't be run from inside Windows XP. XP is incapable of modifying any active partitions, so it has to be done via a 3rd party boot option. There are tools that could potentially work within XP, but setting them up and running the processes will take just as long as figuring out burning a LiveCD to boot into Linux and run GParted.

1) Yes, GParted needs to be booted separately. It can be run as an application within a proper Linux OS or separately in its own limited OS. Go to distrowatch.com and find the link to gparted on the right side.

2) If the space is unallocated, you can do whatever you want to it. However, if the backup partition is in the middle, you cannot extend the first partition into that space - partitions need to be contiguous unless you use some seriously funky and fragile magic. You can move the backup partition to the end of the space, but that might take a while. If there's nothing in the backup partition, delete it, expand until you have 10GB or so empty at the end, then create another partition there.
Alternatively, you can just create a new partition in that empty space and store data there separately. XP doesn't really needs over 60GB of space, and if you ever need to reinstall your OS, your data will be segregated from the OS. Whether that is a good or bad idea is a separate discussion and can be searched within the forums fairly easily. This option would mean you dont' need to use GParted at all, and instead use disk management to just create a new partition.