Duplicate a HDD?

satanicguardian · 15 May 2015 at 12:33

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!

satanicguardian · 15 May 2015 at 12:38

Ohh excellent, what software could do this for me?

satanicguardian · 15 May 2015 at 12:46

I'll check them out... YARGHHHH MATEY

satanicguardian · 15 May 2015 at 13:07

Does macrium do the job properly even as free version?

satanicguardian · 15 May 2015 at 15:42

Macrium it is then!

Is cloning a 500GB HDD -> 500GB SSD a very long process or?

satanicguardian · 18 May 2015 at 13:11

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?

satanicguardian · 18 May 2015 at 22:55

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!

satanicguardian · 19 May 2015 at 17:42

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!

satanicguardian · 20 May 2015 at 14:12

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?

satanicguardian · 20 May 2015 at 14:33

Initially I had the failing laptop HDD inside my main rig, I put the SSD in next to it and attempted to use my rig to create the clone between the two, is that bad practice and perhaps why I had problems?