Is 'cloning' necessary?

sjt269

sjt269

sjt269

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11 Dec 2004
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Hey all,

It occurs to me that I should have asked this sooner, but never mind. I built a PC a few months back with an SSD for Windows and an HDD for storage, like most of us do, but I just used an old HDD to save me buying a new one (stretched my budget to breaking on the processor). It turned out it was only 320Gb, not the 500GB I thought, and after installing games, music recording gear, and random things I want to keep from old computers, I'm rapidly running out of room.

At some point in the next few months, I'll buy a new HDD, either 1Tb or 2 Tb. What I want to know is, since the HDD isn't my boot drive, can I just manually copy all the files over to the new drive then swap the drive letter and have all working like it does now, but with more space? Or do I need to 'clone' the disk so all the programs still work?

Thanks,
Steven
 
You can do that with data and things like steam (install steam then copy the folder over) but not with software. So the easiest thing to do is change the drive letter of your 320GB drive and then put the new disk in and copy things over.
 
I presume that cloning also copies the partition table, MBR, etc. Also probably essential for copying drives that are part of RAID arrays. Will also ensure that ACLs (file permissions) are correctly copied.
 
So basically, there's nothing inherently wrong with manual copying (in this case, with the drive being neither a boot drive or part of a RAID array) but we're wary of unknown technical gremlins, whereas cloning is guaranteed to work?

If I clone a 320Gb drive onto a 1Tb drive, will it only be a 320Gb partition? I know I can extend the partition manually afterwards, I'm just curious. I'll have a hunt around this forum for recommendations of (free?) cloning software, but if anyone replying to this could point me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it.
 
its always more fun to clone:D

plus it more or less guarantees that everything on the hdd has been copied over and will be identical to original drive
 
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