Can A Laptop Hard Drive Clone Be Done?

Is it possible to clone an EIDE laptop hard drive through usb? I have the new larger laptop hard drive hooked by adapter cables to my usb port. Acronis won't recognize the hard drive connected by usb. It doesn't show up in My Computer or in Disk Management either. Is there anyway to do this?

 

I don't think Windows will recognize the new drive unless it is formatted. But the way I would approach the Clone process is what is known as a Reverse Clone.

Put the original drive in the external enclosure and the new one in the laptop. Then with the bootable True Image Rescue cd, boot up and use the Clone feature. See if this works.

 

I decided to just do a clean format and reload. I would be interested to know if anybody has tried the reverse clone.

 

You might try the procedures listed in My guide to Manual Cloning using the TI Rescue CD. This is work in progress but it should help.

And yes, reverse cloning works and for some models of laptop, it is the only workable cloning solution.

 

This will work when the external drive is connected by FireWire. Last week I cloned a laptop drive in this way. I used a Sweex pcmcia firewire card in the laptop and an external enclosure with an Oxford firewire chipset.