How to create an image of a hard drive

clonedisk-image

I have an old laptop with a 20 GB hard drive, a spare 60 GB hard drive, and I'd like to convert the laptop to use the new larger drive by copying an image of the 20 GB drive onto the new drive and expanding the partitions.

Once I get the image of the old drive onto the new drive I can manage the re-sizing of the partitions, but I'm not sure how to create the image of the hard drive, or how to copy that onto the new drive.

One slight trouble is that I don't have my desktop machine here (I also don't have a laptop-drive to IDE converter) and so I'm going to need to do all of this using a live CD and an external USB hard drive.

Best Answer

Create a BartPE CD with the EASEUS ToDo Backup plugin.

Tutorial: Run EASEUS Todo Backup from BartPE based boot CD-ROM

  • Connect your external hard drive
  • Boot into BartPE and clone your disk to the external drive.
  • Replace the old HDD with the new drive.
  • Boot into BartPE again and clone your external disk back to the new HDD.

You can also use Clonezilla, but you must clone to image file if the external HDD is larger than 60 GB, as it will not allow you to clone driectly to a target drive smaller than the source.

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