Cloning OS HDD

theonlyBuster · February 27, 2015

So a little while ago, some of the needed hardware on my laptop suddenly stopped working. To continue working, I pulled the hard drive out and installed it into my desktop. After I updated/installed the drivers everything was running just fine.

I've since decided to keep everything on my desktop, so I purchased a 1TB HDD with the plan on cloning the laptop HDD (320GB) to the 1TB desktop hard drive.

It's been a while since I've cloned so i looked into a few tutorials before attempting. We long story short it doesn't appear to be cloning correctly. For starters, after what i thought was a successful cloning, i later found out during a boot that the boot parameters on the 1TB HDD could not be found. I loaded the laptop HDD and loaded the 1TB as a secondary drive and it looks like all the partitions and sizes match but because (I assume) it's a clone, Windows wouldn't let me browse the drive.

I've tried a few different cloning softwares and all have given me negative results. Clonezilla was able to clone, but no boot drives could be found. My question is am i possibly doing something wrong? Is my original laptop hard drive corrupt/problematic? Should I just give up and install a fresh OS on the 1TB and manually transfer the data over?

Laptop HDD was OEM Toshiba Sattelite series drive.

1TB is a brand new WD

Obviously cloning would be easier and more seamless, but I will manually transfer if absolutely necessary, but i'd much rather not.

Laptop Hard Drive

Image is AFTER cloning was attempted and failed. I removed the clones partitions from the 1TB and I was left with the following...

Disc0 = Laptop HDD

Disc1 = New WD 1TB HDD

C Drive is the OS

A Drive is partitioned simple storage

Altecice · February 27, 2015

When you clone with clonezilla make sure to overwrite any BCD and accept the warnings. Clonezilla will do a sector by sector clone of a drive but will only add the boot sector if you allow it to do so.