How do I transfer my system to a replacement drive?
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. Here's the question I got.
"My hard drive States that failure is
imminent and I should replace it immediately.
Questions are as follows.
When I replace my hard drive, will I need to install a new operating system?
Is there a way to clone my current hard
drive completely, including my operating system?
If I'm able to clone my entire hard drive, will I need hardware or some device
between the old hard drive and the new while I do the transfer?
What's the best way to save my existing
files if I can't salvage my entire hard drive?
Are there software programs that can help me do this?"
Indeed, there is software to help.
They're called backup programs.
And there's something I talk about a lot.
While there are many different ways to accomplish kind of what you've
described here, what you've described is really common
by the way. To deal with a failing hard drive that needs to be replaced,
I want to go over what I consider to be the single best way to accomplish exactly
what you're doing, mostly because it's exactly what I do.
So the very, very first step. Back up your existing hard drive.
By that I mean create an image backup
of the existing hard drive of everything on it.
All the partitions, all the data, everything to an external drive.
If you don't have an external drive, get one.
This is the way to make this happen.
By backing up your existing system, you now have something that you'll have
available when it comes time to put things back on a replacement drive.
Now, if you've been paying attention to Ask Leo! for any length of time,
you'll know that this is something that you should already have.
This is exactly the scenario that backing up is so critical for.
My recommendation in general is that you take a periodic full system image back up
once a month. And then daily do incremental backups.
So you've never lost anything more than a portion of a day.
By doing that, you already have the exact
image backup you're going to need for a replacement hard drive.
Now, you specifically are very
fortunate in that you're getting warnings that your hard drive is about to die.
Most of the time, a hard drive will die suddenly and without any warning.
That means you won't have an opportunity
to pay attention to a warning and make an image backup.
Right now, you'll be relying on whatever
your backup strategy was up until that point.
Make sure your backup strategy is in place
and that you are taking those image backups regularly.
Now, if your hard drive ends up dying to the point where you can't boot your
system, you can't reliably make an image backup of it.
You can't run the backup software because things are that broken.
There's one other straw to grasp at. With the backup program of choice.
I tend to recommend either Macrium Reflect
or EaseUS Todo, but there are others out there that will do this as well.
What you'll do in order to eventually
restore your backup is create what's called an emergency disk or a rescue disk.
This is either a CD or a DVD or a bootable USB stick onto which the backup software
writes a copy of itself that you can then boot into.
So you would take your machine.
If you weren't able to make a backup image and you can't install the backup software
on it, you would instead boot your machine from this rescue disk.
The thing most people don't realize about
rescue disks is that while they are optimized and perhaps even default
to getting ready to restore a backup image, they can also create one.
So by using this rescue disk booting from this rescue disk,
you can then at least have a try at making an image backup of the machine without
necessarily having to be able to boot into it again, make that image backup
to an external hard drive because you'll use it in a step
coming up. Next up? Install the replacement drive.
Just swap it out.
That will depend on exactly what kind of a machine you've got,
what the form factor is, what kind of replacement drive you end up getting.
All depends on the specifics of your situation.
I can't speak to that, but your computer's manufacturer can.
Very often, it's simply a matter of making sure you've got the right size,
both physically and that the replacement drive is at least as big,
if not bigger in terms of capacity than the one you are currently using.
Most of the time, the physical size is an easy one to just sort of check off.
It'll be difficult.
Depending on how long you've had your machine, it will be difficult to find
a hard drive that isn't bigger than what you already have, which is kind of a nice
side effect of replacing the hard drive anyway.
You end up with more space when we're all done.
Next up well, remember that rescue disk.
This is the time where you boot from that rescue disk and then run the restore.
The backup software on the rescue disk will allow you to take the backup image
that you've saved on the external drive and copy it onto the replacement drive.
That's the point of an image backup.
Once it's done copying, all of your partitions are there.
All of your data is there your installed operating system.
There's almost nothing else you need to do.
Once that restore is finished and you reboot your machine from the replacement
hard drive, it's almost as if nothing happened at all.
Everything should be there and be working.
Now there is one final I'll just call it
a tweak and that's remember I said that your replacement hard drive is likely
to be larger than the one you had, which is great gives you more space.
What it does mean though is that depending
on the backup software you're running and the specifics of your situation you
may need to tweak the partitions on that replacement hard drive.
Depending on the backup software, it may simply restore exactly what you had
before and any extra space on the hard drive will be unused.
Or in some cases I think backup software
is smart enough to actually extend the partition to use up all the space,
but not all of them are and it's not always possible to do that simply.
If you're lucky, you'll be able to do that with the built in Windows disk manager.
If it gets a little bit more complicated because of some of the other partitions
on your hard drive, you may need to use a dedicated tool
to rearrange partitions, but there's an article on Ashley to do that.
But the bottom line is that if you do
nothing else after the restore you're back in business then it becomes a tweak
and optimization to make use of the additional space that you may have
got because your replacement hard drive is bigger than the original.
But that's the bottom line that's
the scenario basically take a backup or have a backup
replace the hard drive and restore the backup image to the replacement hard
drive and you're pretty much done it really can be that simple.
I've done it multiple times and it's actually very cool to have
that replacement hard drive in there, reboot the machine and have everything
just sort of magically come back as if nothing had ever happened.
For Updates. For comments, for related links and more, visit askleo.com/4261.
I'm Leo Notenboom this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.