Cloning my C Laptop drive in another rig.OK?

[CoolKD]

Hello.

I have a laptop that only has one sata connection and wanted to clone my current Win8 partition to a new and bigger drive that is going in to this laptop.

This job is a usually a no brainer when you have more than one sata connection for HDD.

Now I have thought of using a clone program and do a clone of the old drive that's in the laptop to the new drive that will be hooked up in my main rig(desktop) and then take the new drive out of the main rig and swap it for the old one in the laptop.

I have very little knowledge about networking so I thought if it would be possible to just hook up both old and new laptop drives in my main rig and do the cloning there. My main concern with this method is after plugging in the old laptop drive with my Win8 install on it will

Windows7 64bit(main rig) destroy/fiddle with it so it does not boot any more and clone the same problem to the new drive?

I do not have any USB to SATA or any other USB HDD or thumb-drive to put the image/clone on so you can see my dilemma.

I have all ready checked if I could take out the optical drive in the laptop and use that SATA for the new drive, but it has another form factor and will not physically fit a standard SATA plug.

I was thinking of using AOMEI Partition Assistant as the cloning software.

All help is welcome.

 

Kim.

[KamiKatze]

@CoolKD

I know that Acronis does a very superb job for backups and drive cloning. I don't know if there's a free test version of it though. The data transmission in your PC should work anyways. In case something goes wrong you could wipe your new drive and repeat the cloning in a different way. I mean your old drive won't be gone, so what could go wrong?

[CoolKD]

@CoolKD

I know that Acronis does a very superb job for backups and drive cloning. I don't know if there's a free test version of it though. The data transmission in your PC should work anyways. In case something goes wrong you could wipe your new drive and repeat the cloning in a different way. I mean your old drive won't be gone, so what could go wrong?

My only concern is that Windows7 changes the drive somehow so it doesn't boot when it's back in the laptop.

Thanks for quick response man

[Blackterror25]

as long as your main rigs boot sequence is set to boot an the drive with the main rigs OS you shouldn't run into any issues with that regard.

 

 

 

For copying your OS try making a batch file with the following in it

 

xcopy “C:\” “G:\” /d /s /e /c /i /h /r /k /o /y /f

 

run as admin and obviously change the drive letters first to the correct ones.

[KamiKatze]

My only concern is that Windows7 changes the drive somehow so it doesn't boot when it's back in the laptop.

Thanks for quick response man

 Did you already test that or where did you hear that? That would be messed up! Literally.

 

USB to SATA connectors cost $5-$10 on Amazon.

 

Edit: or what ^he said.

Acronis allows you to create a boot disk and  make certain operations without starting up windwos. btw

[BCMods]

Macrium reflect is good for cloning. Never had an issue with it.

[CoolKD]

 Did you already test that or where did you hear that? That would be messed up! Literally.

 

USB to SATA connectors cost $5-$10 on Amazon.

 

Edit: or what ^he said.

Acronis allows you to create a boot disk and  make certain operations without starting up windwos. btw

I have not done it. And yes a USB to SATA would be the thing, but I'm looking to do this now.

[CoolKD]

OK people.. I did the "put both drives in my main rig and HDD clone" and it was a complete success.

Thanks for your input guys