How to Clone a Drive

Table of Contents:

I. Things to Consider Before Cloning
II. Steps to Clone a Drive
III. Available Cloning Software
IV. Troubleshooting Disk Signature Collision After Cloning

I. Things to Consider Before Cloning:

**Be careful when you are handling hard drives. Hard drives are susceptible to static shock and should be handled only after making sure you are as grounded as possible. Wear an antistaic wrist strap if one is available. If you don't have an antistaic wrist strap, try to maintain contact to the metal part of your PC case as much as possible while handling the drives.

**If you are cloning a larger drive to a smaller one (1TB to a 250GB), make sure the total amount of data on the larger drive is SMALLER than the total capacity of the smaller drive. In the example above the 1TB drive should only have about 200GB of data if it was going to be cloned to the 250GB drive.


II. Steps to Clone a Drive

1) Turn off your PC

2) Physically install the new drive into your computer

3) Boot up normally to your old drive and install your cloning software

4) Open the cloning software and choose to clone your older drive to your new one

*If the new drive does not show up as an option in the cloning software turn off your PC and double check the cable connections on your new drive are secure*

5) Once the clone is finished turn off your PC and unplug your old drive

6) Turn on your PC. It should boot to your new drive. Make sure all your data looks correct and is accessible

7) If the clone worked, turn off the PC and reconnect your old HDD (keep your new drive connected as well)

8) Make sure your new hard drive is first in your BIOS drive boot order

9) Re-format the old drive to use it as extra storage, or keep it as a backup of your old data.


III. Available Cloning Software:

Western Digital, Seagate, and Samsung all provide free cloning software for their respective drives. If you are using a drive from one of the manufacturer's above, here are links to their cloning software:

- Western Digital - Acronis True Image WD Edition: Download, User Guide
- Seagate - Disk Wizard: Download, User Guide
- Samsung *SSD Only* - Samsung Data Migration Software: Download, User Guide

If you are looking for free cloning software alternatives from the ones posted above, Macrium Reflect and Paragon are both very popular choices:

- Macrium Reflect: Download, User Guide
- Paragon: Download


IV. Troubleshooting Disk Signature Collision After Cloning

If you elect to use both drives together after cloning there is a chance you will get a disk signature collision.

If you are using Windows the easiest way to correct this problem is:

-Open Disk Management
-One of the colliding drives will be marked as 'offline'
-Right click the 'offline' drive and select 'online' from the available choices

*Turning a disk online from Disk Management will not cause the disk to lose any data.