can i transfer the contents of 1 hardrive directly to another

C

Comus

New Member
Hi Guys:)
Im new to this forum..so im popping over to say hello and seek a bit of advice

Can i directly transfer the contents of a laptop Sata hard drive to another new sata hard drive and then remove the first hard drive from the laptop- then fit the second one and then boot up and run the computer from the new hard drive....Im hoping the answer is yes

If so do i need to be concerned about formatting the new hard drive first before transferring everything over including the whole of windows if so what do i do about the boot sector which is usually formatted differently..i have only every laid a fresh copy of windows onto a computer.. so this way is new to me..my sons laptop is saying that the hard drive is damaged and may fail but every time i try to do a system image it fails to create and gives me an error message
i have checked the source and destination drives for errors which might cause the backup to fail but i unable find the cause..so i though that maybe i could just buy a new hard drive and then transfer everything across to a new hard drive and then simply use that hard drive to run the computer.

My other concern is that the hard drive in the Toshiba windows 7 laptop is quite small at 320 gig so i wondered if i could use a new 1TB sata hard drive as they can be had for around £50 on the internet but how would i easily utilize the other 680 gigs of space without first formatting the hard drive in order to create a partition for the extra space otherwise it will be unusable to me
Will Windows 7 recognize a 1TB hard drive ?

Thanks in advance for any assistance you may be able to offer:confused:
 
The original drive needs to be cloned to the new drive. This would be much easier to accomplish if you put the original and the new drive in a desktop system and clone that way. Not sure how easy it would be to do this in a laptop when there is usually only one drive bay.
 
You can use Norton Ghost to accomplish this, and you can also use a tool such as a SATA to USB drive converter (usually just a little external box you put the notebook drive in). When you boot Norton ghost, it will see both drives and you can copy from A to B. I have done this several times for clients upgrading to solid state drives.
 
When cloning, you want the destination drive to be as large or larger than the original. For you to clone the 320G drive to a larger drive should not be an issue. You can attach the new drive to your laptop via USB but the clone process will take a long time since USB transfer is relatively slow. If your laptop has an eSATA port, that would be the preferred method.

However, since the original drive is giving errors creating a system image, those errors may prevent you from cloning the drive as well.
 
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strollin said:
When cloning, you want the destination drive to be as large or larger than the original. For you to clone the 320G drive to a larger drive should not be an issue. You can attach the new drive to your laptop via USB but the clone process will take a long time since USB transfer is relatively slow. If your laptop has an eSATA port, that would be the preferred method.

However, since the original drive is giving errors creating a system image, those errors may prevent you from cloning the drive as well.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice..I had considered your last point you make myself however i need to give it a go:)
 
It may or may not be an important point, but ghost will resize partitions for you if you are going from a larger drive to a smaller drive (say SSD).

I am unsure of clonezilla, but I looked at the documentation above for cloning and I saw 3 tools needed. With ghost, you only need ghost.

if you buy an intel SSD, it comes with acronis clone tool.
 
cwizardtx said:
It may or may not be an important point, but ghost will resize partitions for you if you are going from a larger drive to a smaller drive (say SSD).

I am unsure of clonezilla, but I looked at the documentation above for cloning and I saw 3 tools needed. With ghost, you only need ghost.

if you buy an intel SSD, it comes with acronis clone tool.
Click to expand...

Can you not clone by just copying the info from 1 Drive to the other
 
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