cloning sata hard drive to laptop

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s.dot
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cloning sata hard drive to laptop

Post by s.dot »

Hey guys (long time no see!). I'm having pc issues and this is the first place I thought of to ask with all of you knowledgeable folks.

My desktop PC died (fried mobo, RIP). I only have a laptop now. I am getting a SATA to USB external hard drive enclosure to hook up my hard drive from the desktop to my laptop via USB.

Is it possible to clone this hard drive and install it over the existing windows partition on the laptop and make it bootable?

If so, how, and is it free? I have never done any cloning before.
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Benjamin
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Re: cloning sata hard drive to laptop

Post by Benjamin »

I don't know but be EXTREMELY careful with that device. I once lost a ton of data because the HD to USB device changed certain bytes to other bytes during the transfer ruining pretty much everything binary!
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Celauran
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Re: cloning sata hard drive to laptop

Post by Celauran »

Maybe something like dd? As Benjamin mentioned, though, this is scary territory. I'd hook up the drive and copy over the data, but just bite the bullet when it comes to apps and their configurations.
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s.dot
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Re: cloning sata hard drive to laptop

Post by s.dot »

Well, luckily I'm getting a 2 drive enclosure, and I have an extra 1tb drive I can put in it. So, to be safe, I'll make a copy over to that drive and then attempt to clone the 160gb drive over to the laptop.

So you guys don't know if it's possible?
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s.dot
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Re: cloning sata hard drive to laptop

Post by s.dot »

Oh, I should also note I'm looking for windows software. I guess a google would help lol but if anyone has any experiences with one over the other that would be nice to hear.
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social_experiment
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Re: cloning sata hard drive to laptop

Post by social_experiment »

I'm not sure about how bootable it will be but when i worked as a technician the Norton Ghost software was what we used to clone hard-drives. Problem with a direct clone is that you'll still probably have to re-install drivers for all the periphirals, gfx card (if any).
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Doug G
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Re: cloning sata hard drive to laptop

Post by Doug G »

If your dead desktop was an older model, you could probably find a complete replacement system on ebay for not much more than an external SATA enclosure.

Cloning the desktop disk to the laptop will most likely fail, laptops often have many proprietary drivers specific to the model laptop, and sometimes those drivers aren't available for other versions of windows.
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Re: cloning sata hard drive to laptop

Post by flying_circus »

As a direct clone, I tend to think it will fail. This mostly has to do with windows detecting your hardware on install and then enabling/disable drivers tailored to your platform.

As an example, I just made a bios setting last week to change SATA to AHCI mode, I actually did this on 2 machines. Had to edit the registry to start the AHCI driver but only 1 system worked. Same procedure, one system booted to the desktop and the other would crash and restart while booting up, forming an endless loop. Of course, switch the bios back and all was restored.


If it were me, I'd back up your data, install the disk that you want to use into your laptop, perform a fresh install of windows, and then restore your data. There should be no argument, this method will be the most compatible and safe method.

You never know though... you might get lucky ;)

As a side note: windows activation is hardware based, so if you switch all the hardware, you may be forced to reactivate your software.
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