When I clone an old hard drive to another hard drive, and install the cloned hard drive in my laptop, shouldn't it simply boot up, or is there something I'm missing. When I tried to boot up, it couldn't find an OS. I'm thinking I did it correct and might have cloned a bad hard drive. Thoughts?? I have a new SSD I plan to clone from my old harddrive, and I want to be sure I do it right.
Thanks,
Bill
You may have forgotten the 100MB system partition. Have a look at this.
SSD - Install and Transfer the Operating System
I used Macrium's cloning feature, and it cloned that partition as well as the other. I checked that first thing.
I always use imaging and that works. Several people reported trouble with the cloning functions. But there I cannot help you because I do not use that function.
Why do You image rather than clone? What's the difference?
The difference between a clone and an image is like the difference from a photographic print and a negative. A clone is an exact duplicate of the source drive. An image is like a negative in that it is used to create an exact reproduction of a drive or partition, same as a photo negative is used to create a photo print.
I clone my data drives so, if a data drive in my desktop computer should permanently die, I can just pull the SATA data plug on that drive, then plug the clone into the appropriate hot swap bay on my computer (a dock could also be used but it would be less convenient and usually would be slower) and be up running again in a couple, three minutes, giving me time to replace the dead drive.
I image my boot drive because I can (and have) restore the boot drive should something go horribly wrong. Replacing the drive with a clone would take a fair amount of time and be a royal PITA whereas restoring from an image takes only a few minutes. An image also takes up less space and multiple images can be kept on the same HDD along with other existing data. A clone wipes the entire destination drive.
As far as I know, one can't clone one partition only.
Now, that all said, I cloned the one (and only) HDD in my notebook to another drive and the other drive worked perfectly so I don't know why it didn't work for you. I just got an SSD for that notebook and will use whs' tutorial to transfer the OS, etc. to the SSD to ensure I don't mess up track alignment on the SSD.
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