What'll be missing if I just Copy/Paste OS from HDD to another

ICTAddict

Honorable
Jun 21, 2013
8
0
10,510
I'm getting a new HDD today because my old one is about to fail and the Windows partition is formatted with 512 bytes cluster size (which isn't very good, and this way I'm not using Advanced 4k format AFAIK)
I know that I can create an image, restore it to the 2nd HDD and use GParted to convert cluster size, but this will probably take a long time.

So, is there anyway I can do it by copy/paste? like copying the "boot sector", or whatever it's called, from the old HDD to the new one?
 
Solution
You cannot do it with copy/paste as that will only copy actual files, (and then only files which are visible in explorer)

The boot code is not a file.

A disk image or disk-cloning is the only way.

ICTAddict

Honorable
Jun 21, 2013
8
0
10,510
You're right, I couldn't even copy all the files so I tried to clone it using Ghost and Clonezilla but they stopped because of the bad sectors, until I found DriveSnapshot which did the trick and reported 89 bad sectors (GParted reported a slightly different number! )