Cloning Hard drive
Cloning the hard drive
is one beneficial method that duplicates the entire hard drive along with its
content in a single given process. This procedure helps save on time and even
makes it easier. Usually, cloning the hard drive is done by a sector-to-sector
process and you would need the exact similar capacity hard drive and at times,
even the exact same model number. We shall use a free utility called AOMEI Back
upper, which can clone hard drives irrespective of the sizes. All that matters is
the amount of data on the source drive should not be more than the capacity of
the destination drive. Well, let’s cut short the talk and dive directly into
how it’s done. We conducted the workshop on our workstation with a primary hard
drive of 500GB split into two volumes of 125GB and 330GB (Drive C: and Drive
D:). We cloned (or upgraded) this hard drive to a 1TB hard drive. We did not
create any partitions whatsoever and connected the drive to the PC as it
arrived. Here is what we did next.
Download and install
the AOMEI Back upper utility. It can be found on
The utility is just 52MB in size and does not need any serial key or
registration – and it is free of cost. Do note down the volume names and
partition sizes before you begin with your drive cloning. This will ensure you
don’t run into accidental data loss by selecting the wrong drives and
partitions. Check the information in "My Computer" as well as in
"Disk Management" under "Computer management" by
right-clicking on "My Computer" and then clicking on "Manage".
Now that you have
installed the utility, start it up. Click on the "Clone" button on
the left. This will highlight the next option from where you can choose to
clone the disk. The next screen will inform you about the existing partitions,
just the way you saw it in the "Disk Management" section in Windows.
Here you will see that we have installed "Disk 2", which is a 1TB
hard drive we are upgrading to. Note down the drives carefully and proceed.
Further on, you will
be asked to choose the source disk. In our case, it is "Disk 0",
which is the primary hard drive with two volumes or partitions. Click on
"Next" and choose the destination disk (in our case, Disk 2). At the
bottom, you will see two options for cloning: "Sector by sector
clone" and "Partition editing". If both the drives are
identical in size and model number, you can choose to clone it by the sector.
Usually, you would
upgrade to a higher capacity drive, so you need to click on the partition
editor. Click it to know what more you can do with the option.
Here you will be given
three choices:
(1) Clone the entire drive with the exact
partition sizes and leave the remaining free space as it is.
(2) Fit all the existing partitions of the source
disk to the destination disk with appropriate and proportional values.
(3) Edit the partition yourself so you can choose
the volume sizes as per your choice.
You can choose any
option you want or simply select option 1 as it is the safest choice. Option 2
is also good enough, but since you want to upgrade, this is a bad choice.
Editing the partitions yourself is the best choice as you have control over how
much space you want in each of your drive partitions. Once you have made your
choice, move ahead and click "OK". On the next screen that appears,
hit the "Start Clone" button.
This
is the final stage. Your cloning will begin and it should take around an hour
or two. But this is entirely dependent on how fast your PC is and how much of
data you have on the drive. It is suggested that before you clone the drives,
close all software’s running in the background, disconnect any open network
connection and disable your screensaver. Once the data cloning is done, click
on the "Finish" button and shut down your PC. Disconnect all wires,
disconnect the older primary hard drive and replace it with the newer one.
Start your PC and you will find everything as it was, just the drive space has
been increased. This utility can be safely used with PCs running Windows XP or
higher.
[Its Taken from Indian technology website]
