cloning 2 computers to on external hard drive

Can I clone 2 computers to 1 external hard drive? I am not worried about the data, I just do not want to have to reinstall all of my software.

Michael

 

If you want to do what I think you want, the answer is no.

You can not merge the setup and programs from 2 PC's into a single setup with all the software ready to run.

 

You can, however do 2 complete hdrive images to 1 hdrive. This in effect saves your os setups etc, but it takes a few minutes to restore it to another drive when needed.

 

Creating a clone means copying a complete disk to another complete disk (destroying everything that was previously on the destination disk).

Creating an image means copying either all or some partitions to an image file in a partition on a destination disk. You can put as many image files on a disk as you like as long as there is free space.

So you could create an image of a partition, restore that image to another partition, delete all the data files from that restored partition then create another image of that restored partition which would just have the OS and any installed programs.
Do the same for as many computers as you like.

 

Note that you can't CLONE two computers to one hard drive. You can however, put IMAGES of two different computers onto one drive. Cloning is used to migrate to a new disk and the operation will destroy everything on the destination disk.