It is possible to clone an entire hard drive or specific partitions on a hard drive to a new one. This is particularly useful if a hard drive is being upgraded to a larger size for example. Macrium Reflect manages the hard drive IDs such that the target disk will be bootable on the same system once the cloning process has been completed.
Cloning your Hard Drive to another Hard Drive will give you a bootable new hard drive with the state of your computer at the time you undertook the clone. As an alternative to cloning, you could Image your hard drive, saving the Image file to another Hard drive. The benefit of an Image over a clone is that an Image file can be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly at a day and time you choose. You can restore an Image file to the original or a new hard drive or even to a new replacement computer (the latter may need the Professional or Server editions of Macrium Reflect to make the new hard drive bootable with new hardware by using ReDeploy; a cloned hard drive installed with new hardware may also need these editions of Macrium Reflect for ReDeploy).
Clone a disk
In order to clone a disk, you must ensure that your system has the target/destination disk installed on the system. It is possible to delete and reconfigure any existing partitions or configure new partitions within Macrium Reflect, so there is no need to do this prior to the cloning process. However, in this tutorial, it is assumed that the new disk contains no partitions.
As well as cloning to a hard drive installed in your computer you can also clone your hard drive to a hard drive installed in a ?USB hard-drive Caddy? using this as the Target/Destination. To boot your computer with the hard-drive from the Caddy, the hard-drive will need to be installed into your computer such as by using SATA.
There are some links at bottom of tutorial for further help with Cloning or Imaging.
1. Click on the disk you wish to clone. In this case MBR Disk 1[0F0452A1] and click 'Clone this disk' as shown in red below.
2. The clone disk wizard dialogue should pop up. In the destination section click the 'Select a disk to clone to...' link.
3. Now select the hard disk you wish to clone to. In this case, there is only one disk available for cloning to.
4. You can now drag and drop the partitions you wish to be cloned as shown by the red arrow below. Please note that if you already have established partitions on the target disk, you need to select each one and click the Delete Existing partition link before you can drag and resize partitions from the source.
In this example, the 127GB disk is being cloned to a 1TB disk. Obviously, this will easily fit but may leave large parts of the target disk unused. It is therefore possible to modify the size of each partition to fit the new disk.
5. To modify the partition sizes, click the 'Cloned Partition Properties' link
This gives the partition properties. To adjust the size of the partition, you can drag the arrows circled in red, you can set the partition size precisely using the 'Partition Size' entry boxes or you can default the partition to the maximum size available on the new disk, the minimum size or the original size using the buttons on the right.
6. When the target partition size has been set as required, click OK
7. Repeat the drag-and-drop and configuration process for all the partitions that are to be cloned and when satisfied, click Next
8. A summary screen is shown. Review the settings and then click Finish
9. The partitions selected will now be cloned and when complete, the old disk can be removed and replaced with the new disk as required.
Video tutorial
A Youtube video detailing how to clone a disk can be viewed below: