Cloning a Hard Drive

[rickmastfan67]

Has anybody done this recently?  Any specific software they can recommend?  Just got a new HD and wanted to back up an old drive of mine onto it so I can retire the other drive.

[sbeaver44]

I use Linux so the dd command line is pretty good for this.  I think there's a couple ways you can use a live cd to boot into a Linux distro with something like GParted or Ubuntu.

Nexus 6P

[vdeane]

Windows 7 (don't know if it's limited by product edition or not) has the ability to backup and restore an image of the drive.

[rickmastfan67]

Well, I'm using Windows 7 (should have mentioned that originally).  And I did look @ the Windows Backup vdeane, but I'm not sure if it will keep the 'creation/modification' times as-is, as I'm working on backing up my old 'file storage' drive (not my OS drive) in my system to the new drive and I want those times to remain as-is.

[jakeroot]

When I replaced the hard drive (HDD) in my laptop with an SSD, I remember having to buy a SATA to USB-3 cable, after which I used some program to simply clone the HDD to the plugged-in SSD. The catch is, I can't remember what the name of the program was (this all happened about five years ago). Samsung has a tool called "Data Migration" that I probably used to clone the HDD, as the SSD I purchased was made by Samsung. But I'm not 100% sure.

Truth is, you can use just about any cloning tool (I'm sure Tom's Hardware has a relevant article for your new HDD's brand (as in, an article that shows you how to clone your current HDD to your new brand's HDD)). I do remember having issues with the BIOS being in the wrong mode, so I blue-screen'd like twelve times before I figured out the issue. Now, the laptop only blue-screens once every thirty starts .