Best way to clone a laptop drive?

fobose · 11 Sep 2008 at 20:19

I currently have a 120GB laptop drive in my laptop which I wish to replace with a 320GB drive. I currently have an external enclosure that houses the 320GB drive (USB and e-SATA).

What is the easiest way for me to clone the drive and how do I go about it? I do have a copy of acronis true image home 11 but have never used the thing. Should I use this or is there a better solution?

jimmy29 · 11 Sep 2008 at 22:19

Acronis is a brilliant piece of software, if you already have a copy then use it.

fobose · 11 Sep 2008 at 22:55

How is the best way to go about it? Can I connect the new drive up in the caddie via USB and clone it that way, then take it out the caddie and bung it in the laptop?

The last time I cloned a drive was using Norton ghost years ago and I think I copied the image to a DVD, then used the DVD to load the image on to a new drive but I am not 100% sure as it was years ago.

Major_Disaster · 12 Sep 2008 at 00:02

Yeah, im pretty sure you could do what you said. Just look for Drive Cloning. Im pretty sure you could use either Disk Director or True Image.

fobose · 12 Sep 2008 at 17:48

I cant get it to work :|

I select the clone tool to start with, select the manual settings, select which drive to clone from, and then clone to, resize partitions and I get to the end where it says what its going to do and it requires a restart.

Once I have rebooted it takes me to a blue screen with acronis true image on it, and says something like "locking partions", "checking partitions" and gets to "finished" and that I should set my old hard drive to slave or change the boot order accordingly. Then press any key to shut down.

So I shut down, I remove old hard drive and plug the new one in its place but it says "please select a bootable device" on bootup or something similar, so I check the boot order and my hard drive is listed to boot first :S I plug the old drive back in and boot to windows fine, then I plug the new drive in externally and find there is no data copied to it :S What am I doing wrong?

I just tried it again and ended up with the same result. It doesn't appear to be copying any data!

I have now successfully cloned my laptop hard drive. I decided to try the "backup" too, then used the "restore" tool. I chose the option not to assign a drive letter as I was hoping windows would assign the OS partition C when I plugged it in and booted from it and it did so I am now happy