hey Fred Kelley here, your Nerd Sidekick
helping you look like the technology hero and today I want to help you clone
your hard drive in your computer. So this would be specifically for cloning the
drive that your computer boots from so that it's very simple to take your old
drive basically get rid of it and put in the new drive that we clone on to and then
immediately boot from that new drive so that you're up and running in a
very short period of time without having to reinstall Windows and a bunch of
other programs. So let's talk about what we're gonna learn today here. The first
thing is "What is cloning? What's the difference between cloning and copying
files?" If you've been using Windows for any period of time at all you've
probably copied files with Windows Explorer or what's called File Explorer now and moving files around is something that we do all the
time. You might move pictures and documents around. You copy those, move
them from one drive to another or one directory to another and you might think
well okay I can just, if I want to make a copy of this drive onto another drive
it's a real simple process to just copy everything, highlight everything and then
drag it over to a new drive and I'm done. Well, it does not work that way. The
problem is there are a lot of hidden files. There are files that you can't
copy with the standard File Explorer and there are file allocation tables and
maybe partitions that are on your drive. There's data that's necessary for the
booting process to happen properly and you just can't copy those things with
your standard software that's built into Windows. And so what you're going to need
is some cloning software that will make a one-to-one copy, byte for byte from
your old drive to your new drive so that it sees your new drive as just like it
was the old drive. So just a whole bunch of reasons why you can't
do this without using some special software.
The good thing is most of that software is free. We'll talk about that in a
minute. So let's talk about, first of all, what you need to actually make a
cloning process happen. Well, you need a computer. I have a computer here that's a
pretty old computer that I want to upgrade the boot drive in this computer
so we'll kind of make this our example project. So you need a computer, maybe a
laptop. I'll talk about that a little bit. So you need to drive. This kind of
represents our drive that we're copying from--the old boot drive. This is the
old-style drive that is super slow and I'm gonna put everything on to a new
solid-state drive that's much faster, no moving parts. And so that is a simple
process to move these from here and so we need the original drive and we need
the new drive. One thing you need to verify before you begin is the amount of
data on the drive that you are cloning. I know in my case I have about 200
gigabytes of data on this drive. The drive I'm cloning everything onto is a
500 gigabyte drive so that's plenty of space available to clone this onto. In
your case you need to check that and let me show you how to do that. So if you go
to your drive, to your to File Explorer or Windows Explorer program and right
click on the drive that you're cloning It's probably your C Drive, and then
click on Properties you can see here how much used space is on that drive and you
want to get a drive that has at least that much space available on it. We also
need a way to get the files onto this drive so that requires two things: we
need power and we need a data cable. Now if you are running a laptop and need to
duplicate everything off of your laptop I'm going to recommend that you get a
cable like this because this is very simple to do. Unless you have a laptop
with an extra bay for a second hard drive
then you will need something like this to copy the files off of that laptop. In
this case with a desktop computer you've got all the space you need
to easily plug in a second drive. But for a laptop if you need to copy
everything off of that, to clone everything off of that let me recommend
this cable. The reason this is so great is it plugs into any USB port that's on
your laptop and then this provides both power and data and it plugs in right
here on the back of this drive and that will allow you to quickly copy
everything externally. So this sits outside your laptop and makes it
possible to quickly copy everything. So the next thing you need is, for, if you're
running, putting everything into a desktop computer you're going to need a
little kit--at least I got a little kit-- here this was $8.99 on Amazon. I'll have
a link for that below and I have a link for this cable in the description below
as well. And this is about sixteen bucks. And this little kit here has some
necessary power supply adapters you need, the cable for plugging in for the data
and then finally this has a little bracket that allows you to mount this
drive, because especially in older computers the the cases were not
equipped to handle this size drive. They were equipped to handle this size drive.
And so what this does is it fits in a bay where an old-style drive would go
and allows you to put this in here, mount it to this and and then just put it in
here so that it sits in there safely. And this even comes with a little screw
driver so all the screws you need, all the power, all the data cables you need
and this would even allow you to, you could put two of the solid-state drives
in here. So that works quite well. Simple little
kick for $8.99. And so those are the things that you need for the
hardware. Now this, I talked about the software a little bit ago. Almost every
manufacturer of solid-state drives--I checked the top 10 manufacturers--and I
found all but one that I could determine had some type of free software that you
could download from their website that will allow you to clone your your drives.
And this is, a lot of times is provided by Acronis and they just have their
name on it. But one of the things the software will do is it will scan the
computer to make sure that that manufacturers drive is somewhere in that
computer. So if it sees, in this case I've got a Samsung drive if I was trying to
use software from let's say Western Digital and it saw this Samsung drive,
that cloning software would not work. So you want to get the software
from the manufacturer of the solid-state drive that you're using. And usually that,
somewhere in the box that comes with that there'll be instructions on where
to go and download that free software. Now let's talk about why you might want
to do this, a couple reasons really for wanting to clone a drive: Number one, if
you want to get rid of this old-style drive that's slow, then that's a great
reason to upgrade to a solid-state drive which could be quite a bit faster in
your computer. The other reason is if you had you maybe you had a drive that you
just felt like it was starting to get old and you were concerned that it may
be going bad soon, you could clone that drive and then have a backup of exactly
where you are, where your computer was that day when you made that clone and so
if the boot drive that you had in there ever went bad you could take the old--the clone that you made--drop it into the computer and it should be off and
running without any hitches. So in this case I am going to install everything
into this desktop computer and so I don't need this, although if you wanted
to do a desktop computer--make make your clone using this type of cable--as long
as you got a USB port you could do it this way. So I don't need that for now
and this is just as a prop so I'll put that out of the way.
And so what I'm gonna do now is I need to connect this solid-state drive to
this computer and so what I have to do is I need to find a, I'm going to open
this SATA cable--this is the style of-- this is a Serial ATA
connection that this solid-state drive has on the back here. It's just this
little, this very short little plug here and so I could very easily just plug
that in here. That plugs in just like that and then the next thing that I have
to do is I need to know a couple of things about this particular computer.
This is a computer I built back in 2007 so it's a little long in the tooth but I
feel like I can probably get a little bit more use out of it for, you know, some
kind of server here in the house and so I if I can upgrade the the boot drive I
think I'll get a little more life out of it. Sure certainly run a little bit
faster. But to understand what type of plugs for SATA are on the motherboard
it helps if you have, I've got the the original manual that came with this
computer. If you still got one of these you can grab it and quickly you should
be able to find out some things about the SATA ports that are in your computer. But if not you can probably go online just look up the motherboard if you have
that and find out what the ports are that are on this computer. So in my case
if you look here right back there these are the SATA ports and what we have in
this case are, we've got seven ports. The main thing you're trying to do
here is you want to plug this into the fastest SATA port on your motherboard. There are computers with more than one version of SATA ports on them. That's why
you need to check your manual There are SATA 1, 2 & 3. 3 is the fastest
so if you have a 3 plug into that. You also want to avoid plugging into ports
if they're designated for use in RAID. So again, just check your manual plug into
the fastest port available and you're good to go. So let's just go ahead and
plug in here to one of these ports. And I can see these purple ports right here. Let's get the glasses. Common theme in
my videos will be "let's get the glasses." Ok, so I'm plugging in. You can hear it
click--pretty simple click in there. Alright and so you can see this new red
cable here is plugged in to that bottom right port. It really doesn't
matter which one you put them in because-- in my case anyway--they're all the same
speed. So I've got the the SATA data cable on here. The next thing I need to
do is provide power. And so I've got different cables in here for power
already just a part of this computer. You want to look for one that's a little
slim--has a little slot here--and there there's going to be in most cases just a
couple of types of cables that are in your, coming out of your power supply. So
you may have one that has four little openings
that's called a molex connector and the type you need in this case is just
called a SATA power connector. And so this little kit that I got here, if you
don't have the SATA power connector-- which could be the case if you're
running an older style computer--there would be here a
converter that would allow you to plug in. This plugs in to the molex style
power connector and then that converts into a connector that is made
to fit into most or all of these types of drives. So there we go. So now I have
connected the power supply and the data to this drive. And so, I mean, really I'm
done in terms of just making the initial connection to begin the cloning process.
This this is, can just sit here just like this. Obviously you want to be careful
with it but it doesn't have to be mounted yet into the computer to do the
cloning. So now I'm going to show you how to do the cloning process so take a look. Okay here we are in Windows and yes, if you're wondering this is Windows XP. It's a really old computer. I don't use this online and so it's not a risk. But if you
have Windows XP you need to upgrade it quickly. Just a quick public
service announcement. So I'm going to start the data migration software from
Samsung. Just as a reminder: you need to download the cloning software that is
provided by the manufacturer of your specific brand of solid-state drive. So
check the box that your solid-state drive came in or go to their website and
look for that. So this is just an example of what this software looks like for the
Samsung version but it's going to be very similar for most any type of
cloning software that you use. So let's open this up. If you have ever worked
with drives before you may be wondering if you need to format the drive like you
would normally do with the new drive. The answer is "no you can take this right out
of the box and plug it into your computer and begin using the cloning
software." It will in essence format the drive during the cloning process. So
I'm gonna click the start button here and what you see here right away is the
source disk. This is the disk that's already in the system. This is the old
hard drive I am going to be cloning and it just so happens to be a Samsung I'm
going to be cloning on to another Samsung disk so don't let that confuse
you. This is a hard drive, the old one. And so just a little information here if you
had multiple drives you would see maybe if you had an E: drive, for example, you
might see that here, but in this case I just have the one hard drive that I will
be cloning from. And so you can see it tells you here it's 465.8
gigabytes and this drive has currently just under 200 gigabytes on it. And so
that kind of is indicated by this if this had if this is nearly full you'd
see this blue bar way out here. And so this is our target drive. This is the
Samsung solid-state drive that I'm going to be cloning everything on to and you
can see it's telling you this one actually is the same capacity drive as
this one, just coincidentally. And so it shows you here once the cloning process
is completed I'm going to have the same 199.8 gigabytes of data
on this drive. That's a real simple look at what you're starting
from, what your source is and what your target is. So now I just need to click
the start button and it tells, give me a little warning that anything on this
drive back here, this new target drive, is going to be deleted. Make sure
you're looking at the right drive, that your target drive is truly the one that
you want to be putting everything on to because anything on this drive gets
erased. In other words, if you have any files at all on the target drive--the
drive we are cloning on to--all those files will be erased and replaced by the
files and data on the source drive that we are cloning. So if your target drive
is not a new blank drive, be forewarned that your
existing files will be erased on the target drive. If you are cloning onto a
new blank drive, you have absolutely nothing to worry about here. And it does
warn you that anything that's open won't be cloned, so if you have programs that
are running it would be best to close those. So the next thing we need to do is
click the yes button. All right so the cloning process has begun here and so
I'm gonna just let this run. I'll come back once the process is over. All right,
so we're coming in for a landing here. You can see we're almost done with
the cloning process and it's gonna end up taking somewhere around 48 minutes. All right, the cloning process is complete. The C: drive has been copied to
the new solid-state drive. The next step is for me to shut down the computer. I
will pull the electrical plug off of the back of the original old hard drive. That
is something I'm going to show you how to do here in just a minute. Our drive is now cloned. We just need to make sure when the next time we boot
this computer that it boots from this drive and not the old drive. The simplest
way to do that is to literally pull the plug. And we're gonna pull out the
electric cable from the old drive. So right now the computer is off. Do this
when it's off. And I'm gonna reach in there. I'm going to, here's my old Drive
and there's a cable, a power cable in the back of that drive. I'm just gonna pull
that out and you can see here's my cable now it's unplugged. The data cable's still
in there it doesn't matter it's not going to hurt anything because there's
no power to that drive. So when we reboot this computer it should boot to this
drive. There are some cases where that might not happen you may have to make
some adjustments to the BIOS but that is beyond the scope of this video. So check
out YouTube if you're if you're having trouble getting it to boot correctly
from this drive once you restart. You can find a video I'm sure on how to
adjust your BIOS settings. Well hopefully that wasn't too painful. Hopefully you didn't have
any glitches along the way and that went smoothly. But you've made
it and so now there's really only one step left to do and that's to put the
drive into the computer. If you have a laptop you'll need to determine whether
or not you have more than one drive bay. If you have just one drive bay you're
gonna have to remove the old hard drive and replace it with this. The way to do
that is going to depend on your laptop So that's beyond the scope of this video
but somebody out there's probably made a video that will show you how to remove a
hard drive and replace it so look for that on YouTube or other places and
you should be able to get your drive permanently installed in your laptop
very easily. So in my case the thing that I've got to do now is I just need to
remove the power cable and remove the data cable. And then I'm gonna grab the
bracket that I purchased. And I've got some screws here to go with that. This
has four holes around the edge of the disk. I can put that in here and mount
that to this bracket. It doesn't matter which direction you put this into the
bracket this bracket will slide in to the computer case in either direction so
you can just line that up here and you want to look into the little baggie here.
There should be some screws that are a little shorter and fatter perhaps. So
I've got four little screws. So you have to just line up the hole here with the
screw hole on the side of the solid-state drive. This little screw you
might want to make sure just check your screws beforehand so that you can figure
out which screws will fit in here. And so you can see there that one goes in it
just slides in there real smoothly. The other screws are meant for mounting this
into the computer itself. So I, now I'm just going to insert this
into the side here. If you have your little screwdriver... Getting these to
line up for the first time can be a little bit of a challenge but once you
get the first one started that makes everything go easier. So there we go
that's driving on in there and then I can, actually going to rotate it around
and do one on the opposite side so that way we'll have one on either side and
then the next one should go in a lot better, a lot smoother, a lot easier. That's it. Okay so I'm just gonna wrap up. I'm going
to go ahead and put the other two in and we'll take it from there. So we've got the solid-state
drive mounted in the bracket. The next thing we have to do is
just decide where in the computer I'm actually going to place this. And if
you've never worked on a computer before don't worry. There's nothing
no magic about this there's no right or wrong. There's just good better and best
perhaps, and so you're you're just going to find a bay within this section here.
And your computer may be different. This is an older style case. So you may have
places down here where these drives may mount. So it's just going to depend on your
case. But in the case of my case I'm going to just pick a place here where
I'm comfortable mounting this. You have to be aware of first of all, which
side the connections are on. So I want to make sure when I put this in that the
the connections for the power and the data are sticking out in this direction
because the wires will be coming this way into the back of the the drive. So
that's kind of the the main thing I have to think about the orientation of this.
And if I pick one of these slots I need to be able to easily get it in there and
you may have devices in you're--installed in your computer
already, for example this graphics card here is pretty large. It can make it a
little difficult to slide a drive into one of the bay slots. So I just have to
think "Okay, I think right here it's a pretty good place I should be able to
slide this in and get that in there without too much struggle." So pick the
spot you want and just go for it and so let me show you how to do that next. So I'm ready to mount this into the computer and before I do that one of the
things I want to look at is the bracket itself and determine what holes I'm
going to be inserting the screws into. So you can see along here you got one, two,
three screw holes where that will go. So let me go ahead and insert this into
the slot here and get that on pushed into the computer So I have the mounting bracket inserted
here into the case. It's sticking out just a little bit. That's fine. Two of
the holes that were on the side of the bracket are here and here. And so next
step I have is just to take the screws here that are meant for that, for
mounting on to the bracket itself--again there are two different kinds of screws
in this little kit, and there's sizes that are specifically meant for going
into the side of the bracket, not into the side of the solid-state drive. So I'm
going to pull those out. I'm going to insert two screws here and on the back
side as well. So let me do that real quickly... I have the mounting brackets securely
fastened to the case itself and really all that's left to do is to connect the
data cable and the power cable. So I'm going to find the power cable that I'd
like to use. Again you may be using this type of adapter. In my case I don't need
that so all I'm going to do is connect the power cable back to the drive and
then connect the data cable to the drive itself. And so those are connected now. So
at that point you're done. You may want to do a little cleanup of your
cables. You always want to think about the airflow within the case. If you can
reduce obstructions that's always a good thing. You may have lighting that you
want to worry about if you're displaying the inside of your case to the
room. But in my case I'm not so all I have to do now is put the sides of the
computer back on and turn it on. Just make sure everything works. Well there you have it.
Hopefully this was a project that went smoothly for you without any
glitches and I hope you see improvements in the speed of your computer if you're
upgrading to a solid-state drive. In my case I booted, my computer boots now in
about 30 seconds versus about a minute and a half so it was project well worth
the time and the expense. But if this is the kind of thing you're interested in
seeing more of this type of thing in the future
I'd appreciate it if you'd subscribe to my channel and give me a thumbs up on
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