Cloning an entire hard drive?

Community Forums/General Help/Cloning an entire hard drive?

GfK(Posted 2014) [#1]
Hello

I have a hard drive with three partitions on it (my OS, development stuff, and a Lenovo restore partition thingy). I want to clone the entire drive, replace it with an SSD, and restore the contents of the old drive to the new one with all the partitions in place.

Is this possible without spending money?


Who was John Galt?(Posted 2014) [#2]
Yes- clonezilla should do it. Just be sure to read the 'limitations' section at this link to see if it fits the bill. There are ways to resize a partition before cloning if needs be. Also, don't forget to activate TRIM on your drive after you have imaged to it, if it is recommended.

http://clonezilla.org/

Tutorial:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/how-do-i-clone-a-hard-drive-with-clonezilla/2254/


GfK(Posted 2014) [#3]
Thanks - will take a look.


Panno(Posted 2014) [#4]
driveimage xml


xlsior(Posted 2014) [#5]
clonezilla, or PING.

Important: If you're using a solid state drive, make SURE that you have AHCI enabled in your computer BIOS/UEFI -- without it, windows 7 and 8 won't be able to support TRIM, which would result in progressively worse write speeds over time. (If the drive is set to IDE/legacy mode instead of AHCI, TRIM will be disabled)

The catch here is that microsoft doesn't support enabling AHCI after install time -- but there are some registry tweaks that allow you to enable it after the fact -- look at google if you need to do that.

and in case this is your first SSD: Be aware that drive performance can greatly depend on useage. In general, if you have more than 80% of the drivespace allocated, write speeds may get lower and lower as well. (There's a bunch of behind-the-scenes housekeeping going on on SSD drives, where it pre-emptively pre-alloocates empty sectors for writing -- without that, it takes much longer to write data since it has to read/re-write other existing data along with the data you're writing, since it happens to share the same sector(s) on the SSD and they can only (re)write an entire sector at a time)


Yasha(Posted 2014) [#6]
You could boot to a live Linux and use the built-in dd command?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Disk_Cloning#Using_dd
http://serverfault.com/questions/4906/using-dd-for-disk-cloning


Calibrator(Posted 2014) [#7]
Some SSDs already come with a cloning software that allows the user to replace the system drive quite easily, even the ones in laptops where you often have no spare SATA connector.

I for example used the "Data Migration" software from Samsung with great success on two systems (one custom Win7 rig and one new laptop with Win8.1) and I was booting them up from their new EVOs in less than an hour.

Their optimization tool "Magician" then does all the necessary changes to the OS.

Caveat: I didn't use the USB-to-SATA drive adapter from Samsung (included in some of their kits) but the one I already had (Sharkoon Quickport).


Rick Nasher(Posted 2014) [#8]
I find Paragon tools quite useful, a tad slow though.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/