I have a 2 tb hd in my htpc. It's clicking a ton and feel it could die any day. Is there anyway I can do a 1 to 1 exact copy of it and plug in the new one and run everything flawlessly?

Reason is, that it also has some programs that launch of it since the main drive is a SSD that is pretty small was meant for the OS for the most part only. I'm not the greatest and knowing where to install certain things and not others so it kind of gets jumbled around between the 2 drives.

I know I can "back up" the data on it so it's not lost. But I'd really like to maybe exactly replicate it so I can just unplug the ticking one and plug in a new one that will be an exact clone.

Is this possible?

Freeware:

http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/

http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/index.htm

http://www.xxclone.com/

Commercial:

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

http://us.norton.com/ghost/

 

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Macrium Reflect is good for that and it is great for backups/archives.

 

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Seagate's DiscWizard (Acronis)


WesternDigitals Acronis

BTW the ones I linked are free if your using one of their drives.

Cool thank you everyone. Has anyone had more/less success with any of the above or is this a pretty standard procedure?

I use Reflect on a weekly basis. I've also used it for, and suggested it, to clients. I've never gotten a complaint. Heck I mounted an image that has been sitting on my NAS for like 4 years to grab some old emails and it was totally painless. Like double click, hit OK, browse drive, copy off what I want, type painless. It is even easier to use it to recover or copy between drives. I use it regularly to upgrade HDDs since it will expand to fit the new drive seamlessly when you do a recovery.

 

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i'd use clonezilla for what you want. the only issues you'll have are the different partition size, and giving it the same drive letter again.

unplug your ssd and any other harddrives. plug in the harddrive to copy, and the new one, and boot from clonezilla disc. do the drive to drive copy, old one is your source and new one is the destination (obviously ) the copy won't take very long at all (well, depending how much data is actually on that 2tb drive )

after the copy is done, shut down and plug in the ssd, other stuff, and the new hdd (dont plug in the old drive) and boot into windows safe mode. assign the new drive the same drive letter as the old drive and have it do a check. if the source/dest drive/partition sizes are different at all (which they will be), the checkdisk will be necessary (windows might do it on its own but if not, do it yourself).

you'll be good to go after that.

 

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