Duplicate a HDD?

satanicguardian

satanicguardian

satanicguardian

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Hey guys,

I have a customer with a laptop that's HDD is failing slowly, he wants his laptop refurbished which I'm happy to do.

I was going to upgrade his RAM from 4GB-8GB and replace his HDD with an SSD - my question is:

Is it possible to make an EXACT clone of his harddrive, copy it onto the SSD and make it boot first time as if nothing had changed? I want him to experience a seamless transition if possible.

Thanks!
 
Yes.

For best performance you start from scratch but a clone of your HDD onto the SSD will function far better than the HDD ever did.

I was going to do that earlier this week for a family computer but decided to start a new windows 7 install on the SSD rather than clone the xp install from the HDD.
 
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Depends on the speeds of the drives. But even if the old HDD is slow, i can't imagine it taker longer than an hour or two.

May be worth checking if you can do AHCI also, i know there is a little registry tweak you can do, i don't know how much faster that makes things, but i've always been told to do it.
 
Ok I keep getting an error about - verify file system failed, almost as soon as it starts.

There are 3 drives in the PC, the one is the OS for that machine, the other is the laptop hard drive being cloned (1 MBR partition, 1 Data and 1 windows) and the blank SSD.

Anyone have any clue?
 
Suspect the laptop drive has many bad sectors which you'd need to fix with chkdsk before you will be able to clone successfully.
 
Eurgh, it's been doing chkdsk for like 3 hours now :(

For some reason if I boot laptop with new SSD and RAM in, I can get to boot menu, choose the DVD drive and it just chugs for ages and then nothing, EHHHH!
 
Boot from USB. DVDs are slow and unreliable.

I'd always go for a fresh install. Laptop makers cram them with so much junk nowadays. Cannot beat a boxfresh Windows.
 
I'm trying to do a fresh install now (actually using a wintobootic iso of windows 10 which I know works fine).

I've noticed the laptop freaks out and just refuses to boot if it doesn't have the original hdd in - boot the PC with the ssd in and after a few seconds (even pressing f12 to access boot menu) it just takes me to an error screen (similar to bootmgr missing with an 0x000 error code) saying something about a required piece of hardware is missing.
I'm guessing toshiba have some sort of safe boot in place to allow it to only boot with it's manufactured HDD; more googling and I flashed the bios to try and let it boot from SSD, no luck!
 
I use Acronis 12 for cloning HDD to SSD, in fact I upgraded my work desktop to an SSD today exactly this way. Took about 30mins to clone over and Acronis shuffles the sector sizing to be SSD ready automatically.

One thing to make sure is that the Windows installed on the source disk is AHCI aware and that the BIOS already has AHCI enabled. There's a small driver update for Windows that you should do before enabling AHCI as Windows 7 has been known to BSOD after enabling it if the update isn't installed beforehand.

My main home PC has always had a clone-over whenever I've upgraded the OS disk and the same Windows install has seen through 4 such disks in its install life since 2009. 2 of which have been SSDs. So everything can and does go smoothly and can and does turn out to be just as efficient as a clean install on a new drive.
 
I've been able to install windows 8.1 on the original HDD (and RAM) from a wintobootic stick, chkdsk shows no errors, do you think perhaps it may work better if I attempt to clone to the SSD by attaching it via eSata or an external enclosure? Would this would better perhaps than placing both drives into a totally different rig to clone?
 
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