Questions on cloning my HDD

[concernedcivilian]

First off, if I clone my Western Digital HDD, can I copy everything to a Seagate?(does cross brand cloning work)

Second, is there anything special I need to do before cloning and copying my HDD? can I just plug in the new HDD(but make sure its a slave drive in BIOS) and use EaseUS to clone my HDD and copy everything to the new drive?

Thanks for reading. Any help is appreciated.,

 

[popatim]

theres nothing special to prep for besides making a backup before you begin but most people omit this step since their real important data is usually already backed up somewhere.
You dont need to make sure its a slave drive.
yes cross brand cloning works fine.
I always put the cloned drive into the original drives sata port after the cloning has finished and before booting up for the first time with it.

 

[concernedcivilian]

theres nothing special to prep for besides making a backup before you begin but most people omit this step since their real important data is usually already backed up somewhere.
You dont need to make sure its a slave drive.
yes cross brand cloning works fine.
I always put the cloned drive into the original drives sata port after the cloning has finished and before booting up for the first time with it.

Thanks a ton. I have one more question, do I need to format the new drive before copying everything on it?

 

[jnewegger23]

I just cloned my 1tb samsung to a 4tb hgst a couple of days ago and everything went perfectly. I too almost formatted my new hard drive but I only initialized it as gpt bc it is more than 2tb and just a storage (does not need to be bootable) drive. I made sure not to have the old drive connected and had the new 4tb cloned drive in the old one's sata position, booted up and all was good! I'm still afraid to connect my old one yet. I'm researching the forums right now to see when that's okay or if already was and I'm being just too joshin careful! So, simply put, no you don't need to have it formatted. I don't think it will hurt either way but no formatting for me worked fine. Let us know how this went!

 

[concernedcivilian]

I just cloned my 1tb samsung to a 4tb hgst a couple of days ago and everything went perfectly. I too almost formatted my new hard drive but I only initialized it as gpt bc it is more than 2tb and just a storage (does not need to be bootable) drive. I made sure not to have the old drive connected and had the new 4tb cloned drive in the old one's sata position, booted up and all was good! I'm still afraid to connect my old one yet. I'm researching the forums right now to see when that's okay or if already was and I'm being just too joshin careful! So, simply put, no you don't need to have it formatted. I don't think it will hurt either way but no formatting for me worked fine. Let us know how this went!

Thanks for the advice. I just purchased the drive last night,(decided to go with the WD Black 2TB) so I'll let you know how it goes once it gets here.

 

[concernedcivilian]

HDD got here today. Successfully cloned my old HDD to the WD 2TB Black using Acronis WD edition. I love having over 1TB of free space. I use my pc primarily for gaming, so 1.8 TBs will last me a long time. Thanks popatim and jnewegger23 for the help.

 

[popatim]

Anytime

 

[jnewegger23]

HDD got here today. Successfully cloned my old HDD to the WD 2TB Black using Acronis WD edition. I love having over 1TB of free space. I use my pc primarily for gaming, so 1.8 TBs will last me a long time. Thanks popatim and jnewegger23 for the help.

Glad to hear it went well! Any time!