Skip to main content

Disk image to new disk (Laptop)

Thread needs solution

I'm a little wary of starting this process. I have 2011 Home for the express and only purpose (at the moment) of creating an image of my laptop's hard drive, inserting a new drive and restoring the system, programs and files on the new drive.

The manual is a little verbose and not as direct for this simple act as I'd like.

What is the process I should use?

Tedd

0 Users found this helpful

Hello TL Cadd,

Welcome to our Forum, we're glad to greet you here. I understand your concern, and will be glad to assist you with the question.

I would suggest you to use the cloning feature in order to proceed with your scenario. This process requires less steps with the same result. Generally what you need to do is: 

  1. Plug in the target drive (where you want to move your system) into the laptop directly and the source drive - via USB
  2. Boot your machine from the bootable CD (which can be created by means of the product or downloaded from your account as an ISO image and burnt onto the CD)
  3. Select Tools & Utilities -> Clone Disk
  4. Select the Automatic mode to have your old disk's partitions automatically and proportionally resized to fit the new disk
  5. Select your old hard disk, which is connected via USB, as the source disk
  6. Select the new hard disk, which is installed in the laptop, as the destination disk
  7. Click OK to allow the product to erase all data from the destination disk (required to do the cloning)
  8. Review the operation on the Summary window, and click Proceed to start the cloning

You can find the more detailed instructions with the screenshots in this KB article. Please let us know if something's confusing you, we will be glad to assist you.

Thank you.

Note that trying to use the image from one laptop on another means that OS is going to expect the very same hardware. To work around this issue gets a bit tricky. You can use the Acrdonis ATI Plus Pack, which is designed to address this kind of situation but note that the version of Windows on most laptops will not transfer successfully to a different machine -- oem licenses are usally restriced to the machine the os came on.

Relish your newfound freedom and build you new laptop from scratch.