Cloning my Hard Drive

I want to clone my 250GB Seagate SATA Drive to a 1TB Western Digital HD...i was wondering would there be any conflicts if have the same OS (Vista 32bit) on both drives while they're active or would it setup where i'd have the choice of which to boot from? Thanks for any help in advance

 

Depends on what you mean by "clone". There are utilities that will literally CLONE a drive's contents byte-perfect to another drive, there's copying/pasting files from one drive to the other, and quite a few options in between.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish, and why? Knowing this will help us steer you in the right direction.

 

thank you for the timely response...i want to clone the drive EXACTLY..OS and all, i want to do this because my current HD is 4yrs old and though it hasn't shown any problems, i'd like to take precautions in the event it just craps out on me

 

In that case, I would suggest this utility:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/EaseUs_Disk_Copy_d4845.html

I personally use Acronis TrueImage, which isn't free, and can be somewhat complicated to learn/use. I haven't had experience with Easus, but there are those that use it on this forum, should you have questions regarding its use.

 

ok thank you, ill look into that...as for the other part of my question. will there be any conflicts with the same OS on 2 different hard drives?

 

If you are cloning the drive, you should not have both drives connected when booting the machine. If you're planning on using the old hard drive for file storage, I'd suggest formatting the drive (after making sure the new HDD works alright, and performing the manufacturer's Short and Long tests on it with 100% success).

If you have two hard drives with an OS on them, especially if you add both drives without editing the boot information file, your computer may not know what to do, and could possibly not boot at all. Or, it might figure it out and have both OS's available to boot from, but as they are the same, it will be difficult to know which is which. Basically, you're just asking for trouble maintaining the OS on both drives. Why would you want to, if they're the exact same anyway?

 

i suppose you're right...i guess since i have nowhere to store the old HD i figured id just leave it in there...guess ill disconnect the SATA power and data cables...thanks again for the help mcsmc

 

No problem! You can always buy an external enclosure for the old hard drive if you want to use it as an external drive, as well.