It is possible to clone an entire hard drive or specific partitions on a hard drive. This is useful if you are upgrading to a larger hard drive. With Macrium Reflect you can boot the target disk on the same system after cloning. Cloning your hard drive creates a bootable new hard drive with the state of your computer at the time you undertook the clone.You can clone to a hard drive installed in your computer or to a hard drive installed in a USB hard-drive Caddy.

Windows cannot boot from a USB connected drive. This is a restriction imposed by Windows. If you clone your system disk to a USB connected external drive then, to boot your clone,  the physical disk must be removed from the USB caddy and attached to your Motherboard SATA port.

Deleting and re-configuring existing partitions or configuring new partitions is possible with Macrium Reflect, so you don't need to do this prior to cloning.
 

A Dynamic volume is a logical abstraction of the underlying physical disk and may be striped or extended over multiple physical disks. Because of this, Dynamic volume file systems are copied not disk partitions.

If your source disk contains Dynamic Volume(s) then the background will be orange and the link will show 'Copy Dynamic Volumes...':

 

 

In the Clone Wizard:

  • The partition selection check boxes and 'Copy selected partitions' link will not be available. Therefore, Dynamic Volumes must be dragged and dropped to the destination. 

  • To copy source Dynamic Volume(s) to destination Dynamic Volume(s) you must prepare the target as Dynamic and format the destination volume(s) in advance of the clone operation.  This can be achieved using the Windows Disk Management Console to convert one or more physical disks to Dynamic.

  • A destination Dynamic Volume cannot be resized so the 'Cloned partition properties' link will not be available if the destination is Dynamic.

  • To convert Dynamic Volume(s) to standard partitions, select an unformatted or an MBR/GPT basic disk as the destination and use 'Drag and Drop' to copy the source volumes. After the clone operation you can leave the disk as a 'Basic' disk or convert to Dynamic using the Windows Disk Management Console.
     

See also: Bare metal restore of a dynamic disk system

 

  1. Select the disk you wish to clone in the main application window and Click 'Clone this disk'..

  2. In the wizard that opens Click Select a disk to clone to...


  3. Select the hard disk you wish to clone to. In this case, there is only one disk available.

     

  4. If you do not want to modify the order or size of partitions of the clone, click Next. This is the default behavior.
    Alternatively, drag the partitions you want to clone, the red arrow below shows this. 

    Becomes

    In this example, there is 400MB of free space after the copied partition. You can modify the size of each partition to fit the new disk if required.

    You can delete partitions on the target disk by selecting and clicking 'Delete existing partitions'..



  5. To modify the partition sizes, click Cloned Partition Properties and adjust the size of the partition by:

    1.  Setting the partition size precisely using the Partition Size entry box.
    2.  Resize the partition automatically by clicking Maximum size, Minimum size or Original size.



  6. Click OK.

  7. If required, click Advanced Options to change settings for this clone:




  8. Click Next.
    The options to Add Schedule, Edit Schedule or Delete Schedule is displayed.

    Click 'Add Schedule' to optionally schedule your clone

    Make any required changes and click Next. 
    For more information see Scheduling backups.

  9. Review the settings and click Finish.

  10. Verify the settings in Backup Save Options and if appropriate, click OK. 

    Note: Saving a backup definition enables you to run your Clone at any time with a single click
    Note: You must save your backup definition if you have created Clone schedules. Your schedules cannot run if this step is missed.

    If you want to run the Clone at this point, select 'Run this backup now' and click OK.


  11. A Warning box appears, if appropriate click Continue.

    The target disk for the clone operation will be overwritten. This is unrecoverable, so please ensure that the target disk contains no valid data.



    The clone operation now starts.

If you receive the error message 'Incompatible Disk Selected' when cloning then please see this article for more information: Incompatible Disk Selected

Creating a clone video