HP hard drive clone

Hi I would like to clone an entire HP hard drive which has both the windows user partition and the HP system recovery partitions on it, and have the HP recovery partiton work when I'm done. I have Acronis True Image 10 and DDS but I want to make sure this will work and where to proceed. Thanks Rodger..

 

If you have somewhere to store a full hard drive image of your computer such as an external usb hard drive I would suggest using the image/ restore process to create the duplicate drive rather than doing a direct clone.

In outline you create a full image of the hard drive. The next step is to remove the existing hard drive from the computer and replace it with your new target drive. The last step is to boot using the recovery CD with the image holding drive attached and follow the restore Wizard to make your new drive.

Then all that remains to be done is to eject the recovery CD and boot to the new drive. Because the old and new drives are identical you can keep the old drive as your "Clone"

This method is virtually foolproof because there is no risk to the old drive as it is safely out of harm's way while the creation of the new drive takes place.

Of course the Acronis cloning method can be used to directly clone to the new drive if you have nowhere to hold a fullimage of the existing drive. However this method is inherently more risky as both drives are connected at the same time and any incorrect selections can result in two drives with a lot of unallocated space and nothing else.
If you decide to use direct cloning look up the detailed "reverse cloning" instructions which can be found with a short search in this group. Done this way the geometry of the new hard drive will be preserved while in some circumstances a clone to an external drive may create problems.

You should not have to use DDS for any of the above operations.

Xpilot

 

When you say image restore your talking using Acronis True Image correct? I have an external usb hard drive I can store the image on. Will I have access to that through Acronis True Image? Thanks Rodger