Replace A Hard Drive or SSD For FREE Without Losing Data

so I guess we're doing it again today I'm going to show you again how to clone one hard drive to another for free hopefully this program won't get paywalled immediately after releasing the video you know like the last one did stay tuned I hate it when this happens I just did a video recently showing how to upgrade your hard drive without losing your data the objective of that video was to clone one hard drive to another for free it was a really good video and got tons of views unfortunately though almost immediately after doing it the program that I was using in that video got paywalled so we're back again so I can show you another free way to clone one hard drive to another but first I 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 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 so the reason why you would want to do this is if you're upgrading your system to a different hard drive and you don't want to lose your data and settings now this is a really common problem when you're upgrading from a spinning disc to an SSD or you might be simply upgrading to a bigger SSD when you make this upgrade you don't want to lose all the data on your system preferably you would like your system to be exactly the same way it was just with a better storage device now there's a couple of things that you're going to need in order to do this the first one is going to be hen's boot CD on a USB drive if you follow my channel then you should probably already have that but if you don't I'll leave a link down in the description below on a video that I did on how to make one of these and then the next thing you're going to need is a way to plug your hard drive into your system with your old hard drive still plugged in now if you're doing this on a desktop this shouldn't be a problem just grab yourself an extra Sata cable and plug it in the way I typically do this is to borrow the SATA and power cable from the CD ROM drive in the system if you have one however if you're doing this on a notebook or a system that doesn't have any free SATA ports you're going to need one of these little USB dongles like this in order to connect your hard drive to your system I have a couple here for either a regular satad drive or even an mvme drive now if you're going to do this through u a USB adapter then I would recommend installing your new hard drive into your system first the reason why I recommend this is because the USB read speeds are a lot faster than the USB right speeds so if you're copying from an old hard drive plugged into a USB dongle the new Drive plugged into your system then the chances are the Clone will go a lot faster however the only preface I have to make to this is if you're upgrading to an SSD from a spinning disc a lot of times these dongles don't provide enough power to run a spinning disc if that's the case then you'll have to use the USB dongle for the new Drive instead but in those cases it really doesn't matter M too much because the spinning disc is so slow anyway that the USB right speed really isn't going to make a difference I'll go ahead and leave a link in the description below for these dongles right here I've been using both of these for a really long time and I'm really happy with them so once you have everything setup that you need let's get your system booted into hn boot CD and I'll meet you there okay so here we are in hn boot CD Now the first thing that you're going to want to do this is going to be a little bit different than my last video because there's a couple of steps that I've actually added since doing that video so the first thing that you should do is click on your start menu right click on this PC and click on manage and then from manage you want to go into dis management and essentially what we're looking for right now is we're looking for what our actual C drive is or what the drive that wanting to images and on this one this is going to be a little bit different than yours because I've got a 1 tab drive that's currently in the system that's running Windows 11 but I also have a little 230 GB drive that I use in order to image different operating systems over to the system for when I do videos so that's what we're going to be doing in order to do this video right here is this is actually Windows 10 on this little 230 gig drive right here so we're going to be Imaging this 230 gig over to this 1 terab drive so to do that essentially what you want to do is you want to find the drive that you eventually want on your new drive and in this case that's going to be the e Drive so we just want to make sure what the drive letter is for the main partition on that drive and once you figure that out you can go ahead enclose dis management right here and then from that point you want to go ahead and open up your command prompt now the nice thing is is that when you're using hen's boot CD the command prompt is always in administrator mode so you don't have to hit run as administrator so what we're going to want to do right now is essentially just run a Check dis on our partition and we determined that that partition was the e Drive so to do that we type in chk dsk and then we want to put the forward slf and that's just going to tell it to fix whatever problems it finds and we want to put e Drive and then go ahead and do a check dis on the E drive now this shouldn't take that long to do but it's necessary in some cases because if you don't do this and you have any kind of file system issues on your drive drive then it could affect the image that you do in the end so as you can see it jumped through that and didn't find any problems so we can go ahead and close command prompt now now the next thing that we want to do is run our actual program that we're going to do to image the drive and for that we're going to click on the start button again we're going to go to all programs we're going to go to hard disk tools and we're going to go to Imaging now last time we used aomi backuper which is a great program but unfortunately they paywalled it so we're just going to go one step down and we're going to try lavasoft disc and clone and this one right here seems like a little sketchier of a program but I found that it actually works really well in fact in many cases I like it better now if you have this thing come up at the beginning it doesn't matter because we're not going to use those features anyway so just go ahead and hit cancel and then from this point we're going to want to click clone dis right here and then from the Clone dis window you can see that we have three different discs available now one of these is obviously our USB device we can ignore that completely but we want to choose what our Source dis is so this is the dis that has the operating system on it that we want to image to our new drive and in this case it's going to be this 2 150 gig drive right here and then we're going to go ahead and hit next and then at this stage it wants to know what the destination disc is going to be and in this case it's going to be my one tbyte drive that I have here so we can go ahead and click on that and click next again and now here it gives you a couple of different options you can either copy without resizing partitions which is essentially going to give us exactly the same partition size as we had before but obviously since this is a bigger drive as you can see there's a lot of free space right here we want to actually use that space so if you click fit partitions to the entire disc then it will stretch out your main partition in order to accommodate the whole disc so that way you have more space when you're done so I would recommend selecting that one right there and then go ahead and hit next and then on this screen right here you just want to verify that everything is right because if you don't get this right you could cause a lot lot of damage to your system so we want to make sure our source dis is the correct disc and the nice thing about this program is it doesn't just tell you what the size of the dis is but it also tells you what the brand of the disc is so we can see right here that this one this is actually my USB device right here so that's why it doesn't actually say it's a Samsung drive but it says sabrient because it's the sabrient USB device and then this one is an SPC solid state disc that one's correct so we just want to make sure that both of these are exactly the discs that we want and at that point we can push start and then it's going to tell you that the data on the target dis will be overwritten says are you sure so it wouldn't be a bad idea to actually check again just to double check because if you mess this one up you're going to lose your data and there's nothing that I can do to help you with it so go ahead and verify that everything is correct and then go ahead and hit okay and at that point it goes ahead and starts the Clone so this portion right here is going to take a minute now there's no way of telling how long it's going to take on your specific system because it's all going to depend on the speed of the drive that you're using as well as the amount of data that you're copying now on mine it shouldn't take that long because mine is essentially a strip down OS that I use to make videos off of and it's both going from one SSD to another the only hindrance is that it's a SSD plugged into a USB port but hopefully it shouldn't take that long it says right now it should take about 6 minutes however I have had systems take well over an hour before because you know it depends on how much data that you have on the system so go ahead and let your system finish and I'll meet you back here when it's done all right so here we go once you finish up you should get this little information window here telling you that the Clone was successful and hopefully it was successful for you so once this is done I typically go ahead and hit no right here and then hit close just to cancel this program right here and then at this point you want to actually shut Hon's boot CD Down you don't want to restart because we got to unplug our old drive and typically I don't recommend ripping SATA drives out while it's still running so go ahead and hit your start button and go ahead and hit shut down in order to shut the system itself down and once the system gets shut down go ahead and unplug the things that you have attached like in my case is going to be my SATA drive as well as the USB drive that you use to boot into Hon's boot CD in the first place and power your computer up now if everything worked the way it was supposed to we should boot into Windows 10 however my system has a little bug that when I switch between Windows 11 and Windows 10 the first boot it doesn't actually find the hard drive so let's see if it does it this time and nope it looks like it's working fine so once it boots into Windows I'm going to go ahead and meet you there okay and here we are in Windows 10 so everything worked exactly the way that it was supposed to however if your hard drive is failing or your file system has problems then this method might fail so if your system fails to boot with the new drive then let me show you another way that has a much higher success rate but unfortunately takes a lot longer this other method also has the downside that it has to be done with the destination drive that is the same size or larger than the source drive this next method cannot be done if you're cloning to a smaller Drive which is kind of a rare thing to do but it does happen so if that's what you're doing then hopefully that last method worked because if it didn't you might have to reload Windows and copy all your data manually but if your destination Drive is the same or bigger then then let's jump back on the computer and I'll show you how to do a sector to sector copy okay so in order to do this we're going to need a couple of things the first one is a blank USB drive now don't use the USB drive that you created hyon's boot CD with because we're still going to need that later however get yourself a blank USB drive it can be any size this program we're putting on it is Extreme extremely small so it could be a 1 GB drive and it'll still work fine so I'm using a 16 gig but I'm just wasting a lot of space unfortunately so go ahead and plug your USB drive into your system so there we go and unfortunately I already have the program we're getting we're going to install Clonezilla onto this USB drive however I'm going to show you how to do that so if you don't have a drive already created with Clonezilla you can make your own so the first thing that we need to do is go to Clonezilla website which is Clonezilla org I'll have a link in the description below where you can find this and you want to go to the download section and then from there go ahead and download the latest stable version and then at this section right here you want to make sure it's amd64 is the architecture and then for the file type you want to change this to ISO we don't want the zip you want the iso so go ahead and click download and your download will start shortly now this download is going to take a minute for whatever reason it's a very very small download but sometimes it still takes a second but in this case looks like it's going pretty quick so we're doing good there so the next program that we're going to need is Rufus and this is a program that I've used many times on this channel so you should already have it but if you don't go ahead and grab Rufus just go into their website again I'll have a link in the description below for this and then I would recommend getting the portable version it doesn't require installation you can just run it right after you download it so go ahead and click on that and download that and it should download fairly quickly and at this point we can open up our downloads folder and these are the two files that we're going to need Clonezilla and Rufus so the first thing that we want to do is open up Rufus go ahead and hit yes and then go ahead and hit yes again for it to check for updates but since we just downloaded it I don't think we need any updates but you never know all right so we're going to go ahead and push this select button right here and we're going to choose our Clonezilla ISO that we just downloaded and this is the reason why you wanted an ISO and not a zip file because the iso you can use with rofus in order to make a USB drive so we're going to click on that that and go ahead and hit open and then at this point there's a couple of changes that I would recommend making for instance right here if you're using a system that supports UEFI then I would change the partition scheme from MBR to GPT however if you're using a system that does not support UEFI then I would leave this on MBR but once you change that you should just be able to hit the start button oh you also want to check to make sure that the device is the device that you want to erase because it is going to destroy everything that's on the drive so once you get all of that checked out go ahead and hit start and I would typically recommend just leaving this at the default the right in ISO image mode go ahead and hit okay go ahead and say yes to the warning it's just warning you it's going to destroy all the data on the drive and then once you hit okay it should go through and create the partition for you now once it creates the USB drive all you need to do is boot off of the drive that you just created and make sure that you connect your hard drive drives in the same way that you had them connected before in the last method if that method failed for you so I'm going to go ahead and let this finish up shut the system down get all my hard drives connected and I'll meet you inside of Clonezilla okay so once you boot into Clonezilla just choose your language and then you should be on this screen right here so this is going to give you a bunch of different options what we want is we want to go device to device because we're going to be Imaging from one hard drive to another so once you select that go ahead and hit enter and it's going to go through and it's going to check all the partitions on the different devices that is connected to the system and here we go now the next step is I would choose expert because if you do the beginner mode it's essentially going to use all default options and we need to make some tweaks here so go ahead and choose expert and hit enter and then for this next step you want to pick disk to local disc you don't want to hit part you want to hit dis to local dis that should be the very first selection so go ahead and hit enter and then from here you want to check what your Source dis is and what your destination dis is now this is the part that's extremely important you want to make sure you choose the proper drive here so obviously on mine it's going to be the 250 gig SSD and for mine I'm actually going to go back to Windows 11 now you know because there's no point in imaging Windows 10 because we just did that so I'm going to go ahead and pick the 250 gig SSD here for my source drive then you have to select what the destination Drive is and in my case it's going to be the one tbyte that's in the system right now so go ahead and choose the 1 terabite hit enter and then at this point this gives you all of the advanced options this is the screen that you wouldn't get if you didn't choose the expert mode at the beginning so the two selections you want to make is you want to go down to q1 right here which is for sector by sector copy go ahead and highlight it and hit your space bar to check it then the next one you want to do is rescue go ahead and check that one and what rescue does is it essentially it allows the program to continue Imaging the drive if it falls into any read errors because typically if it finds a read error it will essentially halt the program and we don't want it to do that if there's any read errors you know they're errors we're going to have to deal with them so we're going to go ahead and let it ignore them so once you select those two go ahead and hit tab so you can get to okay and then hit enter and then at this point I would typically recommend skipping checking and repairing the file system and then go ahead and hit okay again and then at this point you want to use the partition table from The Source dis so just keep the default hit okay and then at this point choose to reboot and everything is finished you can choose whatever you'd like to do at this point I would not recommend rebooting though either shut down or choose to do what you're going to do so I'm going to do that one choose to what we're going to do and then at this point it's going to go down and it's going to give you some more warnings and things of that nature in the console so press any key to continue then it's going to go through and it's going to read every everything from the source drive and then once it gets to this point it's going to warn you that there are partitions on the existing Drive which of course there is because there's the Windows 10 that we just imaged to it and that's okay we're going to wipe it out we're going to go ahead and hit yes and hit enter and then it's going to ask you again because this is extremely serious it will destroy all the data on your drive so if you mixed up your source and destination drives you're going to have a really bad day so just verify that what you're looking at is correct and then go ahead and hit yes and hit enter and at this point it's going to go through and it should ask you one more question before it moves to the next part the one downside of this program is everything that it does it does slow but it does it very reliably so that's kind of the trade-off and I guess it didn't okay so there we go so typically what happens is on some systems It'll ask if you want to clone the boot sector information over to the new drive for some reason it didn't ask me on this one maybe it's a new version of Clonezilla and it doesn't ask anymore because it's kind of an obvious question question but anyway at this point right here it's going to take an obnoxious amount of time I've had this program take days before but hopefully in your case that isn't the case but you know most of the time it at least takes a couple of hours so go ahead and let it finish and once it's done I'll meet you in Windows hopefully okay so as you can see everything worked great and we're back in Windows 11 that was the biggest switch between operating systems I think I've ever made I went from 11 to 10 back to 11 in less than an hour and it turns out that Clonezilla took about 15 minutes with my system but you have to also keep in mind that this system is only a 250 gig hard drive and there's literally nothing installed on it these are just base versions of Windows 10 and 11 that I keep on these ssds for doing these videos however the next thing that you're going to have to look at when using Clonezilla because remember we cloned a 250 gig disc disc over to a 1 tbte disc so if you look at your this PC we only have a 230 GB partition that's because it did a sector by sector copy so we're going to have to recover some of that space we have a lot of free space that we could use so the way that we're going to do this is we're going to boot back into hen's boot CD and I'm going to show you how to expand the partition to take up all the remaining space so go ahead and get your system booted back into hn with the USB drive that you created before and I'll show you the next step okay so we're back in hyon's boot CD so this is going to be a really easy step essentially all you do is you go down to your start menu click on all programs and then you want to go into hard disk tools and then from here you want to go into partition tools and pick eus partition Master right here and this is a great program for modifying your partitions so once it fires up I'll go ahead and show you what you need to do in order to take back some of that space you have on that drive so as you can see right here we have 720 gigabytes that are unallocated on that hard drive so we want that back so go ahead and click on your C drive we want to right click and click on resize and move and then from this point all we have to do is take this little Dot and just drag it over to the side and then the program itself is going to readjust the partitions in order to make room for the C drive so go ahead and hit okay and then at that point we got to click up here and click execute our one operation that we have pending and then once we click that and unfortunately there's going to be two steps we have to move one of the partitions before we can resize the other one but luckily the program handles all that for you so all you have to do is Click apply and it should go through and do the job for you and if everything works the way it's supposed to then it shouldn't have any errors hopefully it won't but we'll find out here in a second so it looks like everything worked okay yep it sure did so we're going to go ahead and hit finish we're going to close this and at this point we can go ahead and restart our computer so there you go I have now shown you another way to clone your drive to another and hopefully this program won't get paywalled immediately after releasing this video I do have to say though that I'm sorry for everyone that followed that video hoping to have a free way to clone their hard drive only to be faced with a pay wall now I'm not saying that software makers don't have the right to charge for their software they absolutely do it's their intellectual property and they have the right to charge whatever they want more than anything else it was just annoying for me to have to recreate this video you know exactly the same topic that I've already done because of it but I guess on the bright side it gave me another video idea and sometimes those can be kind of a lot more difficult than you might think and to be perfectly honest with you I think that this method is better than the last one anyway with all that said though if this process doesn't work for you and end up having to reinstall Windows on your new hard drive then check out this video where I show you how to download literally every version of Windows 10 and 11 ever made and it's actually a really useful tool to have as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 253,015

Keywords: how to clone ssd, clone hdd to ssd, 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 a big drive to a small drive

Id: SY052k5bODA

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2024