I have a client who has a slow 4200 rpm hdd in her laptop and I'm going to suggest upgrading to a 7200 rpm hdd. I hate doing disk clones because I always get spotty results. Sometimes it works and others not. I typically use Acronis but every so often I get a situation where the new disk doesn't boot once I've installed it in the machine after the image process. I see windows 7 has a built in system to clone. Does this really work well?
I've personally had good success with the built-in imaging tool. However, I do know from personal experiences that it will not restore to a smaller hard drive than the original. I learned that when I was going from my 1TB mechanical drive to my 80GB SSD.
I've also used Macrium Reflect (free) on a few personal test boxes at work and it's worked very good for me.
Whenever a cloned or reimaged HD will not start, it is normally because the MBRr has not been correctly copied.
To fix this make sure Win7 or (if present) it's 100mb SysReserved partition is marked Active, boot the Win7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD,, then click through to Recovery Tools list to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times to repair or write the MBR to Win7.
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