Hard Drive Cloning

[Triventular]

I wanna upgrade from my old 320gb HDD to an SSD. I'm worried because I don't want to buy a new copy of windows, redownload my games, and copy all my files from my hard drive to the ssd. Is it possible to clone all the contents of my HDD to an SSD? So after when its cloned I don't need to anything anymore.. oh and if it is possible, what are ways I can do that? Thanks!!

 

[WoodenMarker]

Yes, you can use Macrium Reflect. That being said, you can just call Microsoft and use the same Windows key.

[AshleyAshes]

You kinda can do it with the computer itself, but this needs software like Acronis and honestly, getting a machine to clone it's own system drive is a real pain in the ass.

That said, you can just use USB enclosures or docks and use another computer.  I actually have a dual drive dock that has a built in stand alone clone feature, so I can just put a source and a target drive in it, press go, an it will clone the source drive to the target, no additional hardware necessary.

Yes, you really can just clone your system drive and swap it in. I've one it twice with the same computer, cloning an HDD to SSD.  Once when the machine was first upgrade from HDD to SSD, and a second time after the SSD had failed and while waiting on an RMA, I was using a temporary HDD that I just cloned over once the SSD RMA arrived.