Thanks again to all for sharing your wisdom. I was able to create an image on the external HDD. Made one single partition and reformatted the laptop HDD. Restored image to laptop. Worked great. Now I will do it a couple more times. Got a little confused on the restore so I need to practice.
Question: What is the best way to remove everything from a HDD? I just reformatted it. Should I use some other tool? Just trying to understand whats best.
Formatting it will get rid of anything unless someone with special software wanted to find something. That is not something that normally happens. Just for reference, you might read this. How to securely erase your hard drive | PCWorld
A secure erase does what it says - it securely erases the data from your disk. But for a household PC that is an overkill. Nobody is going to come into your house with special tools trying to retrieve your old data.
Last edited by whs; 01 Jan 2016 at 16:58.
I created an image. Removed a couple of programs on the laptop. Restored the image and the partitions were just like they were prior to doing the image. I did nothing to the laptop drive.
I also created an image, reformatted the laptop drive, made it one partition, and then restored the image. The laptop drive was partitioned just like it was prior to doing the image. I had three partitions prior to image and i have 3 partitions after restore.
So its safe to say that using Macrium, all you need to do is create image and restore it. I sure do like the KISS methods.
Hi :) all members of this thread, and thanks for good and clear explication !
I am gonna try this today, also first time
Hello :), completely new with this.
A friend gave me this Toshiba "thing".
I looked it up and found a picture of it : Toshiba external hard drive doubles as an online file server | PCWorld.
So it is a portable hard drive and I can use it to do the " Image Backup" of my laptop 's HDD.
I read about what a HDD is : it stores my data in a non-volatile storage and has a head on an arm that accesses the data while the platters ( magnetic coated ) are spinning in the hard drive enclosure.
Next step .....
This is my disk management, where do I have to "right click" to create a new Partition.
I know that after that I have to click New Simple Volume and so on, but I don't know ( in my scenario ) where to click to start
Thelma -- You do not want to do anything to your PC's HD for the Macrium Image. The image is stored on the external HD. Just plug it into the USB port. Give us a Disk Management screen capture with the external plugged in.
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