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 Drive Caddy.
Important
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 maybe striped or extended over multiple physical disks. Because of this, Dynamic volume file systems are copied not disk partitions.
For more information see
If your source disk contains Dynamic Volume(s) then the background color will change and the link will show 'Copy Dynamic Volumes...':
In the Clone Wizard:
The partition selection checkboxes 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 it to Dynamic using the Windows Disk Management Console.
Macrium reflect v8 adds additional partition resizing and automation options when cloning and restoring.
For more complex scenarios where partitions are resized and moved on different disk sizes, please see Restore and Clone Partition Layout
Select the disk to clone from in the main application window and click Clone this disk...
- In the wizard that opens Click Select a disk to clone to...
Select the clone target disk. In this case, there is only one disk available.
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 650MB 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'..To extend the partition to make use of the remaining space on the destination, click Fill Space.
You can open the more detailed Partition Properties dialogue by selecting a partition on the destination then clicking Layout. Using the Partition Properties dialogue you can:
- Set the partition size precisely using the Partition Size entry box.
- Resize the partition automatically by clicking Maximum size or Minimum size. You can set the partition back to the original size by clicking Revert.
- Click OK.
- If required, click Advanced Options to change settings for this clone:
Option_____________ Description Intelligent sector copy Copy only file system sectors/clusters that are in use. This reduces the time to create the clone as unused file system clusters are not copied. Verify File System Verifying the file system prior to cloning ensures that there are no file system errors transferred to the clone.
Please note that this may take several minutes to completeRapid Delta Clone Copy only file system differences between the clone source and target. This increases cloning speed dramatically.
Enable SSD TRIM Enable SSD TRIM on the clone target to optimize the disk.
Forensic Sector Copy Copy every sector from the source to the target disk partition.
Please note that this option is only necessary if you want to copy unused file system space and will significantly increase the time to complete the clone.Shutdown Set power saving options after a clone task. Email Success Set recipient, subject, body, and attachments should this clone succeed. Email Failure Set recipient, subject, body, and attachments should this clone fail - 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. - Review the settings and click Finish.
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 clickNote: 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.
A Warning box appears, if appropriate click Continue.
Important
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.
Incompatible Disk Selected
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