How To Clone Old Hdd To New One With Macrium Reflect

Hi,

You helped me find the reason for the break down of my computer, for which I am very grateful:

https://forums.majorgeeks.com/threads/cannot-start-up-pc-only-in-safe-mode.320223/

I hope you can also help me with the cloning from the old hdd to the new one with Macrium Reflect. I found out which hdd to buy, but I need help how to do it.

And what kind of physical connection do I use between the 2 hdd's?

Nicoline

 

from reading that post, since you have a laptop, you would have to connect the new hard drive externally with USB. then clone the laptop's old hard drive to the new drive via USB. then the fun begins because you now have to open up your laptop to swap out the hard drive. i watched my brother swap out hard drives, one time, on his laptop, and that is something that i could not do for myself. just take pictures and document the whole process, it's amazing how many little screws these manufacturers use.

as far as using Macrium Reflect, lots of people swear by it, i tried it once, and it was not intuitive to my thinking.
https://www.majorgeeks.com/mg/sortname/drive_cloning_imaging.html
has lots of different options for cloning a hard drive.

the only thing to keep in mind with cloning... definitely give it a try, but with a hard drive that has a few bad sectors, the cloning software might choke and stop when it reaches the bad sectors. that has happened to me before, and i was not able to make an image of the drive until i fixed the bad sectors. and the only way i was able to "fix" the bad sectors was by using an expensive program called spin rite by grc. it found the bad sectors, was able to move the info in them to different sectors, then labeled them as bad so they would never be used again, and that process took overnight to complete. computers are way too much fun.

anyway, i do wish you lots of luck,
and if i have miss-spoke on any points, hopefully some one geekier than me will clarify the thought process.

 

Harmless,

Thank you so much for your reply. I found this user guide:

http://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v7/user_guide/macrium_reflect_v7_user_guide.pdf?src=sidebar

and decided I wanted to do imaging instead. First of all I had to create a Macrium rescue media, which I did, checked it, and it boots up on the dvd on which I installed it and opens up with the Macrium reflect program, ready to restore

Earlier I did this: Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore windows. I suppose it was compressed, because the backup file was supposed to be 297 GB, but only turned out to end at 179 GB. From what I could tell from the user guide, this just mentioned image is necessary along with a full image of the drive that I am going to replace, the C: drive. So today I created an image separately of the drive, the size of the backup file is the same as the drive, 296 GB.

As you say: now comes the hard part, where I need to swap the old hard drive with the new one, but I think my neighbor can help me. What worries me most, though, is, if I copy the bad sectors to my new hard drive, is there any chance, this will happen?

 

After fitting the new drive, open Command Prompt as Administrator and run this command.

Code:

chkdsk /b

 

Eldon, thanks Very good idea, then I'll know for sure, if the drive is okay.

 

a bad sector is a physical characteristic of that particular hard drive. so.... there should be absolutely no chance of that happening. the issue for the cloning software would be reading and extracting that little bit of information, contained in a bad sector. when i had my problem, i was using acronis, and acronis even has a checkbox option "to skip bad sectors". however, when acronis got to that bad sector, it just threw up its hands, said i can't read it, and quit. and i was like... no no no... i checked the box so you would skip it.... arghhh.

then it depends on what kind of information is in that bad sector. it could contain a meaningless piece of info, that you would never notice is missing. in my case, it "appeared" to be part of a font, as best as i could tell. so i was hoping that acronis would skip it, and then i would just reinstall the font, if it was a font that i even use.

anyway, good luck with it!

oh, and i forgot to say.... you mentioned that macrium made a complete image of your C drive. so it feels to me that you will be fine. it made it past the bad sector.

 

FYI
There are two types of Bad Sectors.
Physical (hard). This type of sector cannot be repaired.
Logical (soft). This type of sector can (theoretically) be repaired by Windows Check Disk. Or by a low-level format.

 

Thanks for your support I talked to my neighbor, and he will help me, probably today. Hope the best.

 

My neighbor thought it would be best to create a backup of all partitions, including driveD, at the same time, but this backup failed, it stopped at drive C. So since I succeeded yesterday in creating a backup of only drive C, we created a backup of the other partitions with success. First we restored these, then the single image I had of drive C, and it worked.

Before I even started creating the last mentioned image, I created the Macrium rescue media on a DVD, which created a Windows PE, the most necessary "information" to start up Windows again, if it crashes + a complete Marcrium Reflect program. But also in this situation the rescue media comes in handy, because when you have swapped the old hdd with the new one, you can boot with this DVD and have the Macrium reflect program to restore/pasting the created images to the new drive.

After the images had been restored to the new hdd, I closed the program and the pc restarted by itself. And was I happy to see everything, programs, files etc, just as it was before.

Then I ran the chkdsk /b in the command prompt as administrator, but I didn't see the result. Where do find the log?

 

Run this batch file and upload the log.

 

Here it is, I added 2 to separate it from the earlier ones.

 

The log is clean.

 

Thank you so much for all your help

Actually I found out, after a closer reading of the Macrium Reflect user guide that I should have created this rescue media right away. And you should also do images, before your pc runs into trouble. From now on I will regularly create images of my pc. You never know what happens!

 

You're welcome.

 

And also create an image just before you install / uninstall anything at all that way you can get yourself out of trouble faster than you got into to it !!!

Also pick a prog that allows you to view the contents of the saved image. Don't know if Macrium does that as I have never used it.

I would disable system restore (i've never used it) as it will make your images smaller