Cloning HDD to SSD in a different computer?

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to get a feel on this before i dig into it. I have a dell laptop (school) that i got a SSD for. I also have a clevo laptop at home (main computer), and it has two 2.5" driver bays. Could i install my current dell HDD and the new SSD into the clevo and clone them using this machine? Would this cause any complications?

Thanks,
Ben

You can do that on your notebook, but since you will be using both driver bays for the disk and the SSD, you need to boot from a live CD that includes a cloning application. One of them is Clonezilla. So after you have downloaded the ISO and burned to DVD, you can connect both disks in your notebook and boot into Clonezilla. Then be extra careful when selecting the source and target disk so you don't clone the wrong way and lose all your data! Since the disk may contain multiple partitions as well as bootable information, it is advisable to clone the whole disk and not individual partitions. After a successful clone, you can connect the SSD to the Dell laptop and try to boot it. Once in Windows you will have to activate again and that's it.

I willl be doing the same thing almost later today but I will be using Macrium Reflect.

spapakons said:

You can do that on your notebook, but since you will be using both driver bays for the disk and the SSD, you need to boot from a live CD that includes a cloning application. One of them is Clonezilla. So after you have downloaded the ISO and burned to DVD, you can connect both disks in your notebook and boot into Clonezilla. Then be extra careful when selecting the source and target disk so you don't clone the wrong way and lose all your data! Since the disk may contain multiple partitions as well as bootable information, it is advisable to clone the whole disk and not individual partitions. After a successful clone, you can connect the SSD to the Dell laptop and try to boot it. Once in Windows you will have to activate again and that's it.

Thanks bud. Good point on booting to the cloning software. I was worried about hardware information not transferring or something. But I will go ahead and try this out. Luckily my hdd only has my school files and those are backed up already so if I mess this up, I just have to install Windows again but that's no biggie.

Ben

If you clone the disk, it will transfer the hardware information of the original to the SSD. So the clone (SSD) can replace the original and boot OK. That's the whole point of cloning, otherwise we would be doing a clean install.

spapakons said:

If you clone the disk, it will transfer the hardware information of the original to the SSD. So the clone (SSD) can replace the original and boot OK. That's the whole point of cloning, otherwise we would be doing a clean install.

Yeah sorry. I didn't explain that right, and I really don't know what I meant now that I read it again. Haha. But thanks for the info.

Ben

I meant to use the other computer to clone the disk of the original computer to the SSD. Since the disk is from the original computer, the SSD clone should work there. The other computer is used for running the application only. I didn't mean to clone the Windows installation of another computer. This could work if hardware is similar but then he would not be able to activate legally.