W7 HDD Cloning

Steve

My laptop HDD is dying and I'm looking for replacement options..

It's not that old but has lots of pending sectors, so essentially is fubar in the near future.

What's the best bet? 2 partitions, 75% full. Was thinking of using Acronis to clone the OS, will this work or will I lose my windows licence?

Any tips?

ED E

Clonezilla/Acronis TI or DD on linux will do this fine. Any bit for bit image will do fine.

Licence should be fine. OEM activation is part of the bios and a retail licence will be imaged across. A HDD serial change wont trigger activation issues and even if it did its a 2 minute call to a microsoft answering machine.

riclad

IT,S easier to make a new folder on a usb drive Data 2017 laptop,
then copy all your music ,photos, data ,pdfs.images, etc to the drive.
CHECK to make sure the new data is working, try 10 files ,play music,video files ,load up a few pdfs ,.and photos .
Before you do a Full bit by bit copy of drive c;/ and d ;



http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-drive-cloning-software.htm

Maybe delete the music files ,video files on the drive c ,if You think
its safe to do so.And the new files on the usb drive are safe and copied correctly .

Steve

Thanks for the replies, much appreciated.

drive won't be an issue, can hive that off to a portable drive.

I'll unload what I can from the C: drive and have a look at the suggested utilities.

Will partition size be an issue? I currently have a 500G drive, replacement will be 1TB - it's all that seems to be available in the WD blue 7mm series.

ED E

Steve wrote: »

Thanks for the replies, much appreciated.

drive won't be an issue, can hive that off to a portable drive.

I'll unload what I can from the C: drive and have a look at the suggested utilities.

Will partition size be an issue? I currently have a 500G drive, replacement will be 1TB - it's all that seems to be available in the WD blue 7mm series.

Bigger is fine. Smaller can be problematic.

Once imaged you can use gparted or a windows disk to expand the ntfs volume out to the end.

Seriously id be slow to replace a 500GB spinner with anything not solid state though.

Steve

ED E wrote: »

Bigger is fine. Smaller can be problematic.

Once imaged you can use gparted or a windows disk to expand the ntfs volume out to the end.

Seriously id be slow to replace a 500GB spinner with anything not solid state though.

Thanks, I'm worried about compatibility..

Current bad HDD is a HGST HTS725050A7E630 which is why I was looking at a WD one over the Hitachi (owned by WD apparently)

Any suggestions on how I would find / spec a compatible SSD? I agree it would be heaps better..

Just worried about the different SATA specs that seem to be around, can't seem to find info on what the laptop will take.

ED E

All you need to do is confirm Win7 is installed in AHCI mode. I'd be pretty confident it is. If its not, theres a tweak you can make to enable it. Google will tell you how to check.

Then theres no compatibility issue. You image it over, boot it up, windows will give out for a minute and install a new driver, restart and boom. The final step is to ensure scheduled defrag won't run on the SSD (defrags dont help SSDs but wear them out).

Avoid NVME as drivers arent included in 7, any other is fine.