Skip to main content

Clone Laptop hard drive

Thread needs solution

I have a Samsung laptop with dual booting to Windows 7 and Linux Mint on a small hard drive. I want to clone it over to a larger hard drive and I have been looking over what Acronis has to say about how to do it. It seems to me that I could take out the DVD drive and hook up the target hard drive there and that way I would not have to buy a USB case for it. I have had the DVD drive out already so that's easy enough to do. I have Acronis TrueImage Home 2011 to do this with on the Laptop.

Has anyone tried this before and are there any complications with doing this?

0 Users found this helpful

It should work except I would
remove the old disk and put the new disk in its place so the new disk is on the same connector.
insert the old disk into the DVD slot
Boot from the Acronis bootable media and perform the clone.
After the cloning, shutdown and remove the old disk before first foot after cloning.

You will need a create an TrueImage Bootable media flash drive to replace the CD boot function needed to do the clone.
Insert the empty 512 or 1GB flash drive into a usb connector and start the Acronis Create bootable media program a nd point to the usb flash drive as the target.

I personally am not a fan of cloning and prefer the backup and restore option whiich removes the host from any exposure to risk.

GroverH wrote:

I personally am not a fan of cloning and prefer the backup and restore option whiich removes the host from any exposure to risk.

Will this restore my MBR, because I have a working OSS that dual boots to either Windows 7 or Linux Mint and I would hate to lose that?

You cannot take the word of another as only you know your hardware configurations. What you should do is to test the procedures but that will require 3 disks in total. The source disk; the disk to hold the backup files; the blank target test disk to receive the restore.

Check this link and look at item #3 for Backup information and item #2 for How to Restore a Disk Level Restore

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618

If you make a backup of your entire disk (all partitions--both with and without drive letters)

and then do a disk level restore and restore the "Recover disk signature", the resulting new disk should be not different than the disk created by the Clone procedure.

On first boot using a newly created disk, always boot with only the new disk connected.
All these procedures are based on booting from the TI bootable media CD or flash drive.

Again, do your own testing so you know what works before you change your procedures. Rather be safe than sorry.