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.
Alternatively you can Image your hard drive, saving the Image file to another Hard drive. Imaging has the benefit of being able to be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly at a day and time you choose. Furthermore, you can restore an Image file to the original or a new hard drive or even to a new replacement computer.
Restoring an Image or a clone to a new computer requires the Professional or Server editions of Macrium Reflect to make the new hard drive bootable with new hardware by using ReDeploy.
To clone a disk, your system must have the target/destination disk installed on the system.
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. However, in this tutorial, it is assumed that the new disk contains no partitions.
To boot your computer with the hard-drive from the Caddy, the hard-drive needs to be installed into your computer, for example by using SATA.
There are some links at bottom of tutorial for further help with Cloning or Imaging.
- Click the disk you wish to clone. In this case MBR Disk 1[0F0452A1].
- Click Clone this disk.
- Click Select a disk to clone to...
- Select the hard disk you wish to clone to. In this case, there is only one disk available.
- Drag and drop the partitions you want to cloned, the red arrow below shows this.
- If you have established partitions on the target disk, select each one and click Delete Existing partition before dragging and resizeing partitions from the source.
In this example, the 127GB disk is being cloned to a 1TB disk. It easily fits but leaves large parts of the target disk unused. You can modify the size of each partition to fit the new disk if required. - if required, modify the partition sizes, click Cloned Partition Properties.
- If required, adjust the size of the partition by:
- dragging the arrows circled in red,
- setting the partition size precisely using the Partition Size entry boxes,
- defaulting the partition by clicking maximum size, minimum size or original size.
- Click OK.
- Repeat for all partitions you are cloning.
- Click Next.
- Review the settings and click Finish.
- The selected partitions are cloned and when complete, remove and replace the new disk if required.
A Youtube video detailing how to clone a disk can be viewed below: