Is there anyway to save my entire hard drive so I can "restore" from it later?

Milk · March 19, 2016

I know that you can clone it and save all of your files and boot-ability. Unfortunately I don't have any extra SATA hard drives laying around. I only have an external USB 3 hard disk and thumb drive.

I have tried the cloning option and it doesn't work, my guess is that it's not compatible with USB 3 drives, since i'm using windows 7 (I used WD's cloning software). It works great backing up all of the files and programs (without the boot-ability) but I can't just drag and drop my backup (files, installed programs etc...) on to my new installation of windows can I?

Basically, I'm trying to do something dumb that will probably not work out great and delete (wipe out the entire HDD) my current windows 7 installation. I need someway of returning to my current state. My files aren't that important I just don't want to spend 10 hours re-downloading my currently installed programs. I don't mind having to reinstall windows.

OSBK · March 19, 2016

you can open the external hard drive and use it as a notebook internal hard drive

Stuntman12 · March 19, 2016

You should be able to create a disc image (system image) and save that to the USB 3 hard disk or thumb drive. Not sure the size you would need it to be, but I'd recommend using a usb 2.0 device, just in case what you are restoring to doesn't support usb 3. You can find this in the Backup and Restore section of Windows control panel.

Milk · March 19, 2016

8 minutes ago, Remon Salazar said:

you can open the external hard drive and use it as a notebook internal hard drive

Can't. The USB 3.0 female connector is soldered to the HDD. Plus my laptop only supports, M.2

OSBK · March 19, 2016

5 minutes ago, Milk said:

Can't. The USB 3.0 female connector is soldered to the HDD. Plus my laptop only supports, M.2

there is a software called minitool partition wizard, you can copy the whole drive in the external drive but i'm not sure if the free version let you do that. you can try it

http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html