How To Replace A Hard Drive or SSD Without Losing Data

do you need to replace your hard drive but you don't want to lose all your data and settings well today I'm going to show you how to do just that and it's really not that hard stay tuned now there's lots of different reasons why you may need to replace your hard drive the one that's currently in your system might be failing or it might simply be too small and you need to upgrade to a bigger one most commonly I replace hard drives in customer systems because they have spinning discs and we're up uping them to ssds or you could be like me in my test system here I have a 1 tbte SSD that I use to make these videos however I make videos on both Windows 10 and windows 11 it got kind of annoying having to reload Windows every time depending on what operating system I happen to be using for that video so I have these right here these are two 250 gig ssds and on them is Windows 10 and 11 these are both currently set up with all my video capture software and everything that I need already pre-installed so all I have to do is plug in this little USB adapter right here and I can easily clone either operating system to the drive that's already in the system and that's what I'm going to show you today but first we got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor vipd key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under $20 stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10 also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25% discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10 now on with the video now the first thing that I would recommend getting would be one of these USB adapters like this one and if you're going to be replacing an M2 SSD then you can also get one just like this it does exactly the same thing but you can install an M2 drive into it I'll leave a link in the description below for both of these right here I've been using these adapters for a really long time and they work really well the next thing that I would do is get a copy of hiren's boot CD I'm not going to go too much into detail on this one because I did an entire video on it just a couple of weeks ago I'll go ahead and Link that video down in the description below now the first thing you want to do is take the old drive out of your system that you're currently using and install the new one yes I know it's blank but we're going to get to that we're going to plug your old one into the USB adapter the reason why I do this is because USB read speeds are faster than usb3 right speeds and it'll make the Clone go a little bit quicker however if your old drive is a 3 and 1/2 in spinning disc then I would recommend leaving that one in your system so that your power supply can power it because honestly I don't think these little adapters will power a 3 and 1 half in drive if that's the case then use the adapter for your new SSD and install your SSD into the system once you finish this guide once you have both drives hooked up go ahead and boot your system into hyn boot CD and I'll meet you there okay so here we are in hyn boot CD now I'm currently running Windows 10 on my temporary drive so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and load WIndows 11 on it we're going to clone my windows 11 drive over to the hard drive that's in my system right now and as you can see if we go over to this PC you can see my local disc is 1 tbte and then you can see that the drive that I have plugged into it currently is a 256 Gig if I can find it on on the list right here it's right here okay 231 GB so that's going to be this drive that we're cloning over to our C drive right here and to do that I'm going to use a program within hins right here if we go into hard drive tools go into Imaging and right here where it says backuper I'm not going to even try to pronounce the name of whatever company makes this program because I know it will essentially monopolize the comment section if I try I know I'll butcher it so just click on the one that says backuper so if we click on that it'll go ahead and open up and it might take a second to load because keep in mind that you're actually running this operating system off of a USB drive so it might take a second so we want to go ahead and click on clone down here in the bottom and then from clone we want to click on disc clone and then from here we want to select our source dis now obviously our source dis in this case is going to be the smaller 232 or 240 gig drive right here and then go ahead and once once you click your Source disc go ahead and click next and then we want to click our destination disc this is the dis that we want to write to so the source dis is the original drive that has the information on it that we want to save and the destination dis is the drive that we want all that information to be on so we're going to go ahead and click that right here and then we're going to go ahead and click next and then after that go ahead and hit yes to this warning that comes here and this is just going to warn you that all the existing partitions on the destination Drive are going to be destroyed which should be obvious and we hit okay and you'll see that our source dis and destination disc are right here so it'll give you one more chance to see that everything is right before you actually start cloning and now keep in mind this program will also resize partitions if in fact you're cloning something from say a 1 tbte to a 240 gig and I tested that out and it does work so you can clone a bigger drive to a smaller Drive which a lot of programs don't support that but this one seems to and if you're cloning your if your Destin Drive is an SSD they recommend that you check this SSD alignment right here I've done it both ways and I don't see a difference but they claim that it makes it go faster so well it doesn't slow it down at least so you can go ahead and give it a try and let me know in the comments below if it was faster for you and then once you do that go ahead and hit start clone and the Clone should start if you want you can click on this little link right at the bottom right here and it'll open up a details tab so you can actually see exactly what's happening while you're doing this clone right here so this is going to take a minute to finish so I'm going to go ahead and Skip ahead to when the Clone is done as you can see right now we're we're scooting along we're sitting at about 50% but it will take about 10 or 15 minutes to finish so I'm going to go ahead and Skip ahead and I'll continue on once we finish the step okay so you'll get to this screen right here once you're finished and right here if you have any problems it should actually come up right here if you did but if you didn't you can go ahead and just click close that and you can click finish right here and it'll go ahead and reload all of the discs so we can do our next step so for that we're going to go ahead and close backuper and then we want to load go ahead and click on your start button click on all programs go back over to hard disk tools and then we want to go to partitioning tools and we want to click right here the easiest partition master and this is a great partition program for being able to manipulate Windows partitions and things of that nature so once it launches we're going to go and we're going to look right here and as you can see our one tbte drive now has a whole bunch of unallocated space and that's because we imaged it from a 240 gig drive so as you can see we have 700 gigs just sitting there doing nothing so the way we fix this we want to go to our data drive and you you'll be able to see which one this is because clearly on the old drive this is the data drive so the one that corresponds with that with our 1 tbyte is going to be our data drive for this one so we want to right click on that one go to resize and move and then right here we want to go ahead and grab this little icon here we want to make sure it's not the four arrows we want to make sure it's just the two arrows and we grab on it and drag it all the way to the end and what it'll do is it will intelligently move the other partitions in order to make room so we can expand this partition here so once we hit okay as you'll see our map will lay out the way that we want it to right here and then to finish all we have to do is go ahead and click up here where it says execute and then once you push that you click apply and it'll go ahead and do the jobs that you want to do so it's going to move one partition and then resize another one and then once it's finished go ahead and hit finish and then we can close this and at now at this point what I would recommend doing is disconnecting the old old drive but to do that go ahead and just shut down the system as you normally would just go ahead and hit the shutdown button and that'll turn the system off and then at that point you can unplug the drive that's connected to your usb3 controller now at this point if you used the new drive on the USB controller and the old drive is still in your system this is the point where you want to switch the drive so you can boot it up into your new operating system so I'm going to unplug that real quick and we'll go ahead and fire the system back up and we'll see where we're at hopefully we're on Windows 11 now if you had any problems during the cloning process which kind of happens sometimes especially you have a drive that's kind of on its last legs there's another method that I would recommend using so let's go ahead and jump back on the computer and I'll show you how to do that right now okay so as we can see we're in Windows 11 now and what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to download two programs the first one is a program called Clonezilla so to find that just go ahead and search for Clonezilla and then from there we want to click on downloads and then for Clonezilla we want want to go ahead and download the latest stable version so that's going to be this one right here we're going to click on that going to go ahead and close the ad of course right here and then for the file type we want to make sure that we don't download zip we want to download the ISO file type and then from there everything else can be the same you can go ahead and just push the download button and then your download should start shortly just like the website says and then the next program that we're going to want to use is a program called Rufus which I've used in the past and I'm sure you're familiar with so go ahead and grab Rufus real quick and then from Rufus we're going to scroll down here and we're going to download the portable version right here and it's just because I personally like the portable version it works really well so I'm going to go ahead and download that and once you get both of those downloaded and it looks like rofus got blocked so we're going to go ahead and hit keep and there we go we're going to open up our folder right here we're going to minimize Chrome real quick and then once we go into here we should have an ISO file for Clonezilla and we should have the Rufus program right here so to run Rufus you go ahead and just double click on it go ahead and hit yes to the user account control and then for this little if it wants to check for application updates go ahead and hit yes right there and then there's Rufus now the next thing that you're going to need is you're going to need a blank USB drive or a USB drive that you simply want to use for this right here doesn't necessarily have to be blank but everything that's on it is going to be destroyed once we create a CL Clonezilla boot drive out of this so let me show you to do it so at this point we're going to go ahead and plug our USB drive in once it's plugged in you can see it's detected our USB drive now this USB drive already has Clonezilla on it but I'm going to go ahead and throw it on here again just so I can show you guys what to do so the first thing that we want to do is click on the select button right here and then from the select button it should open up a window and it goes right into our download folder so we can go ahead and select CL Clonezilla here if yours doesn't go into the download folder then go ahead and navigate to your downloads and click on Clonezilla and click open open and then from here what I would recommend doing is changing the the partition scheme from MBR to GPT and the reason I use GPT is just for more compatibility because some systems don't have an MBR boot anymore believe it or not there's a lot of newer systems that only boot UEFI but if you set this to GPT it'll allow you to boot both ufi and MBR if you want so from there you can go ahead and change the volume label if you want but you don't have to but once you get all the settings set the way that you want it go ahead and hit the start button and it'll give you this right here it'll tell you that it's an ISO is a hybro hybrid image so you can go ahead and click Right iso as image mode recommended the recommended mode should work fine so go ahead and hit okay go ahead and hit okay to the warning that it's going to destroy all the data on the drive and then once that starts it'll go ahead and create the USB drive for you now Clonezilla is a really small ISO so it shouldn't take long for Rufus to create a USB drive for you so I'm going to go ahead and let this finish up and I'll meet you in Clonezilla okay so I'm here in my BIOS right here I wanted to go ahead and start this from the BIOS because I haven't used Clonezilla before and just to kind of show you guys how to boot off of the USB drive now your bios is obviously going to be different and the way that you boot off of a USB drive is going to be different but for me I just go into the BIOS click on boot menu right here and then I can select from the list what I want I'm going to go ahead and boot this into ufi mode and once I click on that it should fire it up and then from this point you should be able to click on the first one and just go ahead and click enter and it should start up like normal and then it's going to take a minute to start up so I'm going to go ahead and Skip ahead until it's completely booted and then we'll continue from there all right so here we are on the first screen it's asking us our language you can go ahead and pick whatever language you want and hit enter and then from here we're going to keep all the default keyboard layout settings and then it should boot up and then we can click on start Clonezilla there there we go and this is the first screen this is where it's really important so the first thing that we want to detect is we want to go from device to device and this is going to be the second choice from the menu right here and then it's going to take a minute to go ahead and get everything ready and then from here I would pick expert because since we're having problems we're going to have to use some of the expert settings in order to get through some of the issues that you could possibly have when you're cloning a hard drive so go ahead and pick expert and then from here we want to go to disk to local disk that's going to be the very first one on go ahead and hit yes and then the next stage it's going to ask us to pick our source drive now obviously our source drive in this case it's going to be different for you so make sure that you pick your old hard drive this is the one that has your data on it and for me that's going to be the 250 gig right here and once I select that one right there then it's going to ask me to pick the target drive and the target Drive in my case is going to be the one terabyte drive and then I'm going to go ahead and select that one right there and hit enter and then just make sure sure when you're picking the target drive that your your target Drive is going to be the new Drive the one that you're wanting to replace the old one with because keep in mind everything that's on that drive is going to be destroyed so just keep that in mind you want to be really really careful when you're picking your your source and your target drives for that reason right there okay so from the advanced menu there's going to be two settings that I want you to actually select right here so the first one is going to be q1 it's right here and this one is going to force a sector by sector copy so it supports all file systems and it's extremely inefficient just like it says right here but inefficient and when I when I when it says that it's not kidding it's extremely inefficient and then we're going to want to go down and we're going to want to click on Rescue and what rescue does is it allows the program to skip any kind of read errors that it may have which if you're having a drive that's on its last legs that could be a possibility and it could also mean that the image just isn't going to work but hopefully it will but any chance that you have of it working is going to be checking this rescue box right here and then once you're done there go ahead and hit the tab button so you can get down to the okay and cancel buttons and go ahead and hit the space bar for okay and then what I typically do is I typically skip checking and repairing the source file system so go ahead and select that one and then from this one it says I would recommend the very first one where it says use the partition table from The Source desk and then from here obviously the very first one I would also select chose reboot shut down when everything is finished and then from here it's going to go down to more of a command prompt style now so go ahead and press enter to continue and it's going to go ahead and check your discs and then it's going to give you a warning right here to tell you that all the existing data on the target Drive is going to be destroyed so this is another opportunity for you to look and make sure that you're you're using the drive that you want so right now I want to destroy the data that's on the one terab drive and then these are all the partitions that are on that drive so just make sure that the drive that you're overriding isn't the one that has all your data on it that's very very important so from there we're going to go ahead and hit yes hit enter and then it it asks you again because it wants you to be very very sure what you're doing so yes you want to destroy this drive so go ahead and hit Yes again and hit enter and then it should ask you one more question it should ask you if you want to copy the boot files from The Source drive to the new one and this is also an important one to hit yes to now be prepared Clonezilla doing a sector by sector copy is going to take hours typically depending on the size of the drive it averages between 2 or 3 hours but on badly damaged drives I have seen it take several days to finish and you know what I'm not even joking when I upgraded my dad's system to an SSD the boot Drive was in pretty bad shape and it took 5 days to image his spinning disc to an mvme Drive however that's the exception to the rule I've only had that experience twice in about 15 years on my dad's upgrade it was successful but in the other system unfortunately the Clone was corrupted after several days and I just had to reload a fresh copy of Windows I guess you win some you lose some right so once Clonezilla is completely finished you can boot back into hiren's boot CD and use the partition master in order to move your partitions around and expand them the way that you need to but as you can see it's really not difficult to clone a drive I do it practically weekly depending on what operating system I need to do for my next video but now you have to keep in mind that you have all of your personal data on two separate hard drives so once you finish cloning your old drive to your new Drive make sure you check out this video where I show you how to destroy all the data on your old hard drives don't just recycle your old drive with your data on it that's a great way to get your identity stolen anyway as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 181,901

Keywords: clone a hard drive, clone an ssd, copy a hard drive, copy an ssd, image a hard drive, image an ssd, don't loose your data, replacing a bad hard drive, replacing a bad ssd, clone ssd to nvme, clone ssd to hdd, clone hdd to ssd, clone a big drive to a small drive

Id: cSPLpgI8hjA

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023