help cloning a program/data drive in windows

[nightmarevoid]

My main program hard drive, a western digital caviar black 1.5 TB, has started to show its age with incredibly loud seeking noises and long access times. This is probably because I've put it through hell over the last four years while I experiment and such to learn more about computers. Now I'm looking to replace it with a hybrid drive to increase operation speed but I'm not keen on reinstalling windows and all of my programs. is there a way for me to clone a drive and have it be recognized by my windows registry as the one I replaced? I save all of my programs to the WD black hard drive and have my windows 8.1 operating system running off of two 128 GB corsair force GS SSDs in raid 0. I doubt I can just copy everything over, as it would not carry the same sector information and probably me missing certain hidden files which communicate with the windows registry. If you can give me a hand understanding how windows recognizes hard drives or how to clone it so that my computer will recognize a copy it would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[Thx And Bye]

With GParted you can copy the complete partition to the new drive.

You may give it a go. Just be careful, when working with your data and partition programs.

[R2D2_WD]

Hi @nightmarevoid,

 

As far as I understood, you wish to keep your OS drives and replace just the WD Black, which has some software on it. Am I correct? If so, I would recommend you to use Acronis True Image, which has a WD version, which you can use, since your drive is a WD Black. I leave you a download link below. You could use the utility's cloning function but you should know that there is no 100% guarantee that all your software will work after being cloned. Personally, I have used Acronis once and all went perfectly fine, but, as I said, one should not be 100% confident.

 

http://goo.gl/v3PX4w – Acronis True Image WD Edition download link

 

Hope this helps