My wife’s Dell laptop needed a new hard drive. The original drive was only 20 gigs– it needed something a little bigger. (When your iPhone has almost as much space as your laptop, you know it’s a little old!) Space considerations aside, the drive was moving a little slowly and seemed like it was generating a little bit of heat.
So, time for a new drive. But I was dreading having to reinstall the operating system and of the programs, settings, etc.
No worries. Some cheap utility software rescued me….
To be more specific, HDClone to the rescue. (I bought the Standard Edition of the software seeing as I’ll probably re-use this with clients at some point– and it had better functionality than the free edition.)
I grabbed a cheap USB drive enclosure from NewEgg.com (one of my favorite vendors, btw), and plugged the new hard drive into the laptop.
HDClone has it’s own operating system that you’ll need to boot from. So I rebooted the laptop with the HDClone disk in the CD-ROM drive and followed the wizard provided by the software.
About an hour later: voila. A perfectly imaged hard drive. I was able to replace the old hard drive with the new one and boot without incident. The only issue was that the partition on the new drive was the exact size of my old drive- 20 gig.
So I grabbed one more tool (though this one was free) from EASEUS. The tool is the Personal Edition of their Partition Manager software, available here. It was easy to use and let me bump up the partition size to the drive’s actual capacity.
2 Comments
I am pleasantly shocked by your story. I desperately need to do this too, but I’ve wasted two new Seagate drives trying to use Acronis, a much praised tool. I’ve also read about many horrible problems that people have had with cloning Dell disks with the crazy custom partitions.
So this really, really worked?
I’ve been through hell trying to do this, moving from a 120G to a 320G.
It sure did, Bill.
I was actually surprised how easy it was.
The HDClone software basically makes an *exact* copy of the old drive, so the partitions, MBR, etc. all get copied too.
YMMV, but for me, it was a breeze.