General Question

fortris's avatar

How can I clone an old HDD to a new PC?

Asked by fortris (683points) June 28th, 2011 from iPhone

Windows easy transfer bombed, backup and restore didn’t work right, anyone know any (preferably free) ways to basically make my new PC have the same content as the old one?

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4 Answers

XOIIO's avatar

Use acronic true image home to clone the hard drive directly to the other one. You’ll need to reactivate windows with the product code though. Download Acronis here

XOIIO (18328points)“Great Answer” (1points) Flag as…
XOIIO's avatar

Acronis*

XOIIO (18328points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
styfle's avatar

A open source (read free) utility is dd and is available with most linux distributions as well as Unix systems (such as Mac OS X). It’s a command line tool so you would type something like dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512k copies the drive sda to the drive sdb using a block size of 512k. You can get make a Live Linux CD if you don’t have it installed on your computer.

styfle (362points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
blueiiznh's avatar

First off, if your hardware is different in anyway, you can’t just clone the disk. drivers will be different.
If you are talking about getting your data back it is one thing, but if you are looking to not have to reload applications, that is different.

What is your old and new hardware?

blueiiznh (16698points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…

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