When you clone a drive is the source drive left completely in-tact?

[Mark Bolton]

Have a 1TB disk drive in my primary laptop and it has started to make a tiny bit of noise on boot. I cant be without this machine, have a spare but this is my day to day and hate to switch. Ordered a Crucial SSD, dont have a spare bay so was going to just clone the 1TB disk to the SSD and swap. I have everything backed up to the cloud and external disk but my paranoia still kicks in. Will the disk drive in the laptop be completely as-is right now and usable after I clone it (Acronis) incase something goes haywire?

[Chuck Wintle]

Have a 1TB disk drive in my primary laptop and it has started to make a tiny bit of noise on boot. I cant be without this machine, have a spare but this is my day to day and hate to switch. Ordered a Crucial SSD, dont have a spare bay so was going to just clone the 1TB disk to the SSD and swap. I have everything backed up to the cloud and external disk but my paranoia still kicks in. Will the disk drive in the laptop be completely as-is right now and usable after I clone it (Acronis) incase something goes haywire?

Iys been my experience the cloned drive is not altered on any way.

[Wade Lippman]

I've done it a dozen times. 2 times it just wouldn't work for unknown reasons, but it never hurt the source disk.

[Mark Bolton]

Thanks so much guys. Sets my mind at ease a bit. I have the backups but dont have time to start from scratch

[Mike Henderson]

I don't know any clone software that modifies the original disk when you clone to another disk. I've had situations where I cloned a disk and the new disk wouldn't boot. I was able to put the old disk back in and have it work perfectly.

Mike

[Dave Cav]

I'm in a similar situation; I want to upgrade to a newer computer but don't want to manually transfer all the software, or use the old HDD. Can anyone recommend a bulletproof method or software solution for fully cloning a drive, including the boot partitions and everything else necessary to run?

Thanks

[Jerome Stanek]

Sometime the boot files don't transfer over. Remember that most of the time you will need the same size or larger drive then the one you want cloned

[Dave Mills]

I'm in a similar situation; I want to upgrade to a newer computer but don't want to manually transfer all the software, or use the old HDD. Can anyone recommend a bulletproof method or software solution for fully cloning a drive, including the boot partitions and everything else necessary to run?

Thanks
A couple months ago when I finally upgraded from Win7 to Win10, I went through the same. Wanted to keep my old bootable disk, but didn't want to reinstall everything on a new Win10 build. So I cloned my Win7 disk onto a new (SSD) drive. Then pulled out the Win10 drive and booted from the new cloned drive. You couldn't tell the difference at that point. Then installed Win10 (as "upgrade") on the new disk.

I used Macrium software for making the clone.

[Mike Henderson]

Sometime the boot files don't transfer over. Remember that most of the time you will need the same size or larger drive then the one you want cloned

There is software that will copy to a smaller disk, as long as your used space will fit on the smaller disk. For example, if you have a 1TB drive and you want to copy to a 800GB drive, it will work as long as you haven't used more than 800GB on your 1TB drive. One SW I know of that will do that is EaseUS Partition Manager. I'm not sure if the free version will do that but the pay version will. Not that expensive and they have sales all the time.

Mike

[Curt Harms]

I haven't used Windows much since XP so keep that in mind. I would create a Windows recovery drive. If the new drive didn't boot try the repair device. It's not a bad idea to have such a device anyway.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4026852/windows-create-a-recovery-drive

[mike stenson]

Anything that actually clones (block by block copy) a drive should leave them both identical.

[Barry McFadden]

I have cloned a few drives using Seagate Discwizard (free on the Seagate site) and just select the drive you want to clone to and check bootable and you're done..

[glenn bradley]

Interesting how folks approach things differently. For a Windows based system I look at a move to a different platform as an opportunity to clean up all the garbage Windows gathers as part of its operation. I just recently went through this to move off of an 8 year old i7 machine and onto a nearly new i7 SSD machine. I do regular backups so doing a quick incremental backup prior to moving is no big deal.

Do a fresh load of Windows, grab all the upgrades and patches, load your data files (I do this prior to loading the apps because I sometimes don't remember all the apps I need :o) and load and license all your software. Ahhhh, a nice fresh Windows machine. I use Revo Uninstaller to load / track applications and have for years. It does a great job of uninstalling the app and (most times) ALL the other stuff that the regular uninstall process leaves behind when you upgrade a product or remove one that you no longer want.

@mike stenson, Dig your sig line ;-)

[Mark Bolton]

Interesting how folks approach things differently. For a Windows based system I look at a move to a different platform as an opportunity to clean up all the garbage Windows gathers as part of its operation. I just recently went through this to move off of an 8 year old i7 machine and onto a nearly new i7 SSD machine. I do regular backups so doing a quick incremental backup prior to moving is no big deal.

Do a fresh load of Windows, grab all the upgrades and patches, load your data files (I do this prior to loading the apps because I sometimes don't remember all the apps I need :o) and load and license all your software. Ahhhh, a nice fresh Windows machine. I use Revo Uninstaller to load / track applications and have for years. It does a great job of uninstalling the app and (most times) ALL the other stuff that the regular uninstall process leaves behind when you upgrade a product or remove one that you no longer want.

@mike stenson, Dig your sig line ;-)

That has been my tact for years. I have always been fairly fussy/nit picky about keeping my machine tidy on my end at least though I know that doesnt apply to all the OS junk and updates etc.. But when you are completely covered up with work, and dont have the time to start from scratch re-installing, arranging, getting everything back to just the way it was when you left it, you simply dont have those hours to spare. And they are hours. The install, setting up, re-loading, arranging desktop, blah blah blah. I really use to actually enjoy that whole process and most definitely enjoyed the dead clean snappy machine however it took time.

My motivation would be to start clone before bed, toss machine in my bag in the A.M. along with my travel mug, land at the shop, stick in the new drive, and get immediately back to work without a single hiccup. Id love to have the extra hours for the clean install and downloads of all the apps, passwords, log-ins, plug ins, and the like.

But I dont. Nor do I have the time to find/learn/download any management applications that would handle all or some of that process for me.

[Mike Henderson]

With the iPhone, if you buy a new iPhone - or even reset your old one - iCloud will restore your device to exactly the way it was without any effort or activity on your part. I don't see why Microsoft can't do the same thing with Windows 10. You could just sign on to your new machine and tell Microsoft to restore to this device. Microsoft has a record of all your apps and their serial numbers so they can just disable them on your old machine.

Even if they couldn't do every third party application it would greatly reduce the effort to go to a new machine.

Mike

[Kev Williams]

I'm in a similar situation; I want to upgrade to a newer computer but don't want to manually transfer all the software, or use the old HDD. Can anyone recommend a bulletproof method or software solution for fully cloning a drive, including the boot partitions and everything else necessary to run?

Thanks
The problem with this (as I understand it) is you can only use a cloned drive in the original computer. A different computer won't recognize the Windows you're running, nor its registry, nor any of the machine's drivers. You can use a cloned drive as a slave in the new computer, that way all photos, notes, program job files, etc can be accessed. But any programs installed into the registry will have to be done manually onto the new computers drive...(someone correct me if I'm wrong!)

[mike stenson]

With the iPhone, if you buy a new iPhone - or even reset your old one - iCloud will restore your device to exactly the way it was without any effort or activity on your part. I don't see why Microsoft can't do the same thing with Windows 10. You could just sign on to your new machine and tell Microsoft to restore to this device. Microsoft has a record of all your apps and their serial numbers so they can just disable them on your old machine.

Even if they couldn't do every third party application it would greatly reduce the effort to go to a new machine.

Mike

It's a complexity of sources issue. For your iCloud example, everything that is installed on your iDevice is downloaded from a common repository. This is not the case for applications on computers (doesn't matter the OS to be honest).

[mike stenson]

For a Windows based system I look at a move to a different platform as an opportunity to clean up all the garbage Windows gathers as part of its operation.
@mike stenson, Dig your sig line ;-)

This is one of the nice things about being a *nix guy, I don't generally worry about these things.. and thanks.. it seems to be my life at times ;)

[Derek Meyer]

The problem with this (as I understand it) is you can only use a cloned drive in the original computer. A different computer won't recognize the Windows you're running, nor its registry, nor any of the machine's drivers. You can use a cloned drive as a slave in the new computer, that way all photos, notes, program job files, etc can be accessed. But any programs installed into the registry will have to be done manually onto the new computers drive...(someone correct me if I'm wrong!)

This is generally true, but there is software out there that can "generalize" an image so that it will boot and run on dissimilar hardware. One such program is Paragon Hard Disk Manager, which I use both at home and at work to image hard drives to new units. It's fast and reliable.

Note, however, that just because Paragon can generalize an image for you doesn't mean that you can legally transfer your Windows license to a new machine. Microsoft had restrictions on transferring the license to new hardware, and may refuse to activate it in certain cases.

Derek

[Barry McFadden]

The problem with this (as I understand it) is you can only use a cloned drive in the original computer. A different computer won't recognize the Windows you're running, nor its registry, nor any of the machine's drivers. You can use a cloned drive as a slave in the new computer, that way all photos, notes, program job files, etc can be accessed. But any programs installed into the registry will have to be done manually onto the new computers drive...(someone correct me if I'm wrong!)

I believe you are right Kev.... just like you can't take a drive out of one computer and use it as the primary drive in another computer... just won't work...

[mike stenson]

I believe you are right Kev.... just like you can't take a drive out of one computer and use it as the primary drive in another computer... just won't work...

You can, absolutely, but not if you're running windows