Replace A Hard Drive or SSD For FREE Without Losing Data

Today we are doing another video showing how to replace a hard drive or SSD without loosing all your data. This time we are using a completely free application to do it. I will show you several ways to clone a hard drive or SSD. One way is fast and works in most cases and the other is very slow and works in all cases.

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SABRENT USB 3.0 to SSD / 2.5 Inch SATA I/II/III Hard Drive Adapter

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#HardDrive #SSD #Tech

[EagleDave]

I`ve been in this business for years bro and your videos are good for folks who want to really learn something worth watching. keep up the great work bro!

[PhoticSneezeOne]

Why to this very day is HDD cloning still not just a part of the operating system? Why the artificial tinkering in the PC world? It´s insane.

[thsin]

question. what is the boot cd for? Ive seen a few videos on how to clone my hdd to ssd but but they never mentioned anything like that. only thing i know is just connect ssd to pc>use program to clone hdd to ssd>shut down pc> replaced hdd with new ssd> go to bios to make sure it boots from ssd and done. is that a right way or does it absolutely supposed to be with the boot cd thing?

[blahorgaslisk]

Last I had to clone my machine I transferred from a HDD to a SSD. I chose a Samsung SSD and they had disk cloning software available on their website. It was a version of some commercial software, though I've forgotten what manufacturer. I recognized it as I've used the original versions for many years at work. Samsung had bought a license to use it and called it the Samsung Disk Wizard. It might be worth checking if you are copying to or from a Samsung disk in your system.

[DonnyHootieHoot]

I just now tried to clone from an HDD 1.0TB, on USB3.2, to a 2TB NVME. I could NOT get it to work until I bought an external NVME adapter to go directly from NVME to NVME over USB. I tried for almost two days until success. Thank you for this video!

[totallytrueinfernoriderwuwa]

21:37 yeah the recovery partition is always the rightmost partition, but if you clone the disk to a bigger one you will have C -> Recovery -> Empty space and you cannot just expand C into the space, you have to clone the recovery to the rightmost part of the empty space, then delete the old one, and then only then, expand C.

This is a remnant of when only hard disk existed, btw. On SSD it doesn't make any sense to have an order for partitions, technically, as the data is not physically split, but only logically.
Eventually they'll figure this out and we'll be able to resize any partition regardless of 'order'...

[Spacedog]

If you've done a sector by sector copy it's a good idea to immediately run a disk check on the new drive after because any file system errors on the old disk would have been copied over as they were.

[atimeofshadows]

A quick question. My C drive is only 240GB SSD and is getting full quickly, even though I have installed a 4TB SSD and try to put everything onto that, it still stores extra bits onto the C drive (which I understand it needs to do.) which is filling it and slowing everything down. I just want to make sure I understand this correctly. If I buy a new 1TB SSD. I am able to move Windows 10 and all the contents of my current C drive onto the new 1TB SSD, to make that my new boot drive and C drive? Am I correct with that assumption?

[robertcartier]

20:24
Why are we booting back into Hiren's when Windows itself already has the Disk Management tool to adjust partition size?
What am I missing? 🤔 (Can it not also move the other partition out of the way? Did I just answer my own question? lol)

[gotbordercollies]

If it's Monday, it's time to watch another fine video from Rich. Thank you sir!

[shortguy]

OMG! Using your advice I cloned a 1 Tb drive to 500gB drive as an insurance policy. Worked perfectly. Thank you for being a genius.

[arniep]

Thank you for this video. I followed this method exactly to clone my Dell Optiplex 7010 W10Pro to a NVME 2tb in a USB adapter. The clone took about 20 hours and put up a note that it was successful. I then disable the internal SSD and set the BIOS to boot from the USB connected NVME. It gave me the following errors:
1. No boot sector found, Press F1
2. F1 rebooted and this resulted in the W10 logo on the screen for a while before it threw up a message: "stop code: inasscessible boot device"
3. IT then rebooted itself and gave the message "No boot disk found", press F1
4. WHen I pressed F1 this time, it threw up a list of choices for F1 through F9. F4 and F5 booted it into SAfe Mode, F5 being with network. These both worked.
So now I have this machine which will boot into safe mode from the clone, but will not boot normally.
Any suggestions as to what I may have done wrong and how to fix it?
Thanks....ArnieP

[SORB]

I used Macrium reflect. Worked perfectly.

[kiern]

Thanks so much for this video. I had no idea where to begin. The first method made my disk gpt partition protected so just wasn't recognised nor booting. The second worked a dream. Thanks again!!

[kokodin]

you CAN clone bigger drive to smaller drive with clonezilla though
if partition is smaller than destination drive or is it the last partition on a drive and the total used space is smaller than the size of a target drive you can enable an option to ignore destination drive checking. if you avdenturous you can also try scaling filesystem partition table proportionally
the only problem with clonezilla i see is lack of support for cloning raid0 drives indyvidually

[GarysGeeks]

Thanks for your videos. Even as an IT pro I still pick up useful items, ideas and tools from your feed. Thanks...

[MichaelSullivanCincinnatux]

Tons of great information in this video - much thanks for this. All I needed to do was upgrade the SSD on my desktop PC and what I ended up with is that result plus a bootable USB recovery thumb drive that I have already used a couple of times for other maintenance work. Mucho thanko!

[CarbonGlassMan]

Thank you for the video. Using a second laptop, 2 SSD external cases & 2 of the USB ports on the old Lenovo laptop, I was able to clone my 512gb failing SSD to a new 2TB SSD by using my old laptop as a passthrough. Even my ACASIS NVMe M.2 Duplicator Dual-Bay Offline Clone USB C to NVME Docking Station would not work to clone the old SSD to the new one. I even made a bootable flash drive from the old failing SSD and that wouldn't install windows either. I can't believe I had this much trouble because I've cloned drives several times over the years when I upgraded to a larger drive. I've never had trouble cloning a drive. Even the 1st time I did it, before I knew about cloning, I made an image file from an old small drive and installed the image onto a new larger drive. Even that never gave me any problems. So if anyone is having the same kind of problems that I have been having, Lavasoft, 2 SSD caddies and a second computer to use as a passthrough is something you might try.

[kirikayuumura]

Tinker's Tip: If you buy a name brand retail boxed/packaged drive, it is very likely they offer a branded version of "a software company starting with A" you can install for free as part of that drive brand's "support" software. It won't have of all of the modules functional, but the Disk Clone module will function fully.
The branded version of "a software company starting with A" will check to make sure there is the same drive brand detectable on the system doing the cloning, even if it is connected sata/nvme or USB and even if it is not a drive being cloned to or from, and then once detected, it will then run the clone module.
The tip is, keep one of whatever brand drive connected to the computer, so later when you need to clone other drives, no matter those drive's brand, the "a software company starting with A" software you install originally will still work.
And, if you ever decide to go to another brand drive, just uninstall the previous "a software company starting with A" install and then install the new brand's "a software company starting with A" version and continue to use it.
I have been doing as such for about 5+ years now on my drive cloning / hardware testing PC.
.

[tonymarziano]

This is brilliant! I've been searching for hours to find a cloning method to do exactly what you've just explained. You're a legend! Thanks mate.