HDD Drive Cloning questions

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Flogger23m

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Jun 19, 2009
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Hello,

I plan on getting a new HDD soon as my OS boot/program drive. Considering my OS install is still less than a year old I would prefer not to reinstall everything as that tends to take a while. I would prefer to clone my current drive onto my new one, though I have a few questions:

1) My Current HDD is a 1TB Western Digital. Considering the prices of current WD drives I will most likely be getting a different brand, probably Hitachi or Seagate. I am assuming I can clone from a WD onto another brand?

2) My current drive is 1TB. If I get another drive it will most likely be 2TB. Can I clone a 1TB drive (~ 800GB used) onto a 2TB fine?

3) I have Acronis True Image WD Edition Software. Will this allow for me to clone onto another brand HDD, or would both drives have to be a WD? Looking around online seems to indicate this, though the official page doesn't. If both drives do have to be WD, what other cloning programs are free?

4) I have Win 7 64bit upgrade. When I clone my HDD that will be the only hardware change. I assume I won't have to reactivate my Windows install, correct?

5) With SATA 2 and 800GB of data of varying sizes (some 1GB+ files, lots of small ones) roughly how long should I expect it to take while it clones the drive?

6) Its been a while since I installed a new HDD. Essentially all I do is format it as a slave drive, boot into the OS drive, and then run Acronis, start the cloning process and it should reformat it to a boot drive automatically?

7) Anything else I should know about drive cloning?

Thanks for reading.
 
With acronis you don't need to format, it will reboot the computer, clone, then tell you to unplug the older drive.

Have you considered SSDs ?
 
Only one drive needs to be a WD drive for that software. Basically, you just hook up the second drive, boot into Windows, run the WD clone tool, and it'll do the rest. No need to partition or format the new drive ahead of time. The clone operation itself should take about 2 hours, and when it's done it'll shut the computer down so you can swap the drives. Once you boot up it should work seamlessly, no need to reactivate Windows or anything.
 
Gripen90 said:
You do have to reactivate windows after cloning. I did so after upgrading to ssd
Click to expand...

Did you change anything else at the same time? I've done a number of clones and never had to re-activate, but I'm using the Technet version, so maybe that is a factor. In any case, it is either an online re-activation or a quick call to the automated Microsoft line.
 
Seems a bit simpler than I thought, which is a good thing.

Gripen90 said:
You do have to reactivate windows after cloning. I did so after upgrading to ssd
Click to expand...

Is this an online or over the phone activation? Regardless I assume it should be rather painless?
 
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