How To: Completely Copy Your Hard Drive In 3 Steps

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How To: Completely Copy Your Hard Drive In 3 Steps

March 29, 2009 in Tips & Tricks by Clay/Admin

I was doing my usual weekend shopping at Frys when I saw that they had a WD 320gb SATA hard drive for only $50 and decided that this was a great opportunity to upgrade the old 120gb PATA (IDE) hard drive I currently had in my custom build. I have never completely cloned a hard drive to another so I knew this would be a great learning experience and decided to share it with you! Damn I’m such a nice guy! So here is the step by step procedure that I did to get my old hard drive completely cloned onto my new one.

Enjoy!

What you will need:

New Hard Drive
Philips Screwdriver
Disk Copy by EaseUs
ImgBurn
A Blank CD

Step 1: Download Software and Burn Img

So first things first. I had to find a software that would allow me to copy everything from my current hard drive to the new one. I didn’t want to re-install Windows or have to re-install my games and run countless updates so a program to do it all for me was what I was looking for. A quick Lifehacker search brought my attention to Disk Copy by EaseUs. Not only was this software exactly what I was looking for but it is also completely free!

Go get it here: EaseUs – Disk Copy

Go to where you downloaded the file and unzip the iso onto your desktop so you can get to it easier in the next step.

To run the program you will need to burn the downloaded iso file to a CD using an image burning software. Whats that? You don’t have one? Well don’t worry, ImgBurn is a free image burning software that works great!

Go get it here: ImgBurn

Open up ImgBurn and click “Write image file to disc”

Now click the button to add the img. Using the pop up window, navigate to the place where you unzipped the downloaded iso and select it.

Be sure you have a blank CD in your drive and select burn. Imgburn will now burn the iso to the CD for you.

When it is done you can just close your tray and leave the CD in there for now as we now have to hook up our new hard drive.

Step 2: Set-up Your Hard Drives

For this next part, you will have to take your computer apart and mess with some wires so hopefully your up to it. Disconnect all your cables from the back, especially the power cable. Open up your case by removing screws on the back of the case. Most cases have sides that just slide right off but if your computer is not a custom build then you might need to open up your owners manual and see how to open up your case. Find your hard drive(s) and check the pins to be sure that the one you want to make a copy of has its pins set as master. You can follow the directions here to learn how to connect your new hard drive. If your new hard drive is a SATA then just leave the pins off, but if it is not a SATA then place the pins in your new drive to make it a slave. Double check your connections and set things back into the case. We are now ready to boot up our PC and start transferring our data!

Quick side step: Check your BIOS and be sure that your CD drive is set as the primary source and your HDD is your secondary. Doing this makes your computer boot from the disc that we made earlier. More info about how to access your BIOS.

Step 3: Start Cloning!

With your hard drives set up and the computers BIOS set to boot from the CD then we are ready to begin. With the CD that we burned earlier in the drive, we can now start up our system and beging the cloning.

After the start up you will be prompted with a screen like the one below. Hit “Enter” to Start Disk Copy.

We want to have an EXACT copy of our hard drive so we will just click “Next”.

Now we are showed this screen and must make sure that our source drive (the one we want to make a copy of) is selected. After we have verified that it is selected then we click “Next”.

Now we see the same screen but must select the destination drive (the one that we want the copy to be copied to) and then click “Next”.

This screen will show you the preview of what is about to take place and what the drive will look like after it is completed so just click “Proceed”.

Now we just need to sit back and look at this screen for a while. Depending on the size of your drive that you are copying, this may take a couple hours. Mine was 120gb and took a little over an hour.

Now that our hard drive is duplicated, we can now put our other one away for safe keeping just in case something happens to our new one. Now, what you do with your old hard drive is up to you but before you do anything to it be sure that your new hard drive is working 100%. It would suck big time if you formatted your old one and the booted up your computer only to find out something went wrong during the copying and now your screwed!

I hope this little walk through helped some of you but if you have any comments or questions, just leave a comment below and I will do my best to help you out.

Oh, and if you did find this helpful please Digg it, add it to Delicious or just do a nice little Tweet about it using the buttons below. Thanks alot.