Cloning a hard drive?

Question

My 40 GB hd drive (on a Gateway desktop) is not only nearly full but making ominous noises, so I want to swap it out for a 500 GB hd. I'm uncertain whether "cloning" the hard drive is what I need to do. Does cloning my current hard drive to the new one copy all my data, applications, and even the operating system? Will my computer run normally afterward?

There seems to be a lot of conflicting information floating around online, and am paralyzed with indecision. Appreciate any help.

Answer 1

When you CLONE a drive, the disk to be CLONED to must be the same SIZE. And this is not what you are trying to achieve, So cloning is not the correct term.



There are two main programs I would recommend that you consider purchasing that work well:



Acronis True Image



http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/?source=us_google&ad=ati&c=2660523497&k=acronis%20true%20image%2011&gclid=CJzClcD-y5wCFQ9JagodZ0NsKw



And Norton Partition Magic 8



http://shop.symantecstore.com/store/symnahho/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.44316200/pgm.6037100/ThemeID.106300/Currency.USD?resid=aB7mqwoBAkgAABUGaNwAAAAn&rests=1251656190780



You will just have to read up on these two sites and see which one you prefer and which one says it can do the job for you.

Answer 2

considering which you very own the two hard drives... it is not unlawful (interior the USA of a) to clone your hard tension. it has been a criminal precedent for some years that a backup of your media is criminal, as long as you at the instant are not utilising the backup on an identical time because of the fact the unique. it is against the licensing of many products of utility to apply the 2d hard tension to run a 2d reproduction of a software on an identical time (confident, an OS is a software) in case you place yet another computing gadget at the same time, caught your outdated tension in it, and started out it up, technically that ought to be unlawful (copyright infringement). confident, notwithstanding if dwelling house windows refused to boot, you had to apply section of dwelling house windows to work out if dwelling house windows could paintings. ;>

Answer 3

The simplest way to clone a drive is to use the DOS command Xcopy, this will copy everything including hidden and system folders to the new drive.



http://www.computerhope.com/xcopyhlp.htm

http://commandwindows.com/xcopy.htm

Answer 4

download clone software driveimage XML or macrium reflect and it will make an exact copy of your drive onto a DVD or cds And you can make a bootdisk with it that will make an exact clone of the old drive onto the bigger new drive and it will be as if nothing has changed