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April 1st, 2018 07:00
Hard drive replacement cloning windows 10
Diagnostices is telling me that my hard drive is failing.
I intend buying a new sata drive but larger capacity.
I am on windows 10. what is the simplest way to copy/clone the whole drive, os and all, onto the new new drive and then slip the new drive back into the laptop as if nothing has changed!
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jphughan
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April 1st, 2018 07:00
Macrium Reflect Free is a popular tool for this purpose. Also make sure you buy a SATA to USB adapter so that you can temporarily have both drives connected simultaneously in order to perform the clone, otherwise you'd need to capture an image backup to some other drive (like an external hard drive), then install the new drive and restore the image onto it. The end result will be the same, but it takes longer and requires you to have an external drive to store the image on, and SATA to USB adapters are cheap as long as you don't need them to be powered (if you're working with SSDs or laptop drives rather than desktop drives, you don't need a powered adapter), so most users prefer to just buy the adapter to save some time. Those adapters also often come in handy if you ever want to pull data off of a hard drive without having to install it into a system, potentially after the drive's original system had a hardware failure unrelated to the drive itself, such as a motherboard problem.
jphughan
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April 1st, 2018 08:00
ejn63
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April 1st, 2018 08:00
If you don't have a backup of your data, make that before you proceed with the cloning.
If the drive is failing because of bad sectors, you may need that backup -- while it's possible cloning the drive may proceed without incident, it's more likely it won't - if there are bad sectors that are occupied by data, cloning may fail at this point.
You may want to run a chkdsk c: /f on the drive before trying to clone it -- that will move data that's still readable to good sectors and improve the likelihood cloning will succeed.
denzelvt
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March 14th, 2019 00:00
So I woke up after having put all my big files (mainly video I captured on my travels) on my external hard drive assuming it would be safe.
Then after the clone it **bleep**ing deleted all those files and I am left with a goddamn copy of only the important things I had left on my computer and not all my RAW and 4k files etc.... big bummer
Memories form over 4 years all gone....