How to Clone a Hard Drive without having to buy extra software

July 23, 2006 09:46:23

Did know that you could clone your current Hard Drive without having to by extra software? Maybe you didn't know that all that you needed, was already set up on your current system?

How to
Make sure that you have a Master and a Slave setup on your system. The Slave drive, in this case, is where all the data on the Master is going to go to.

First: Perform a Scandisk your Master drive and follow that with a thorough Defrag. If you have an Antivirus program, do a thorough sweep with the AV first, then do the Scandisk, followed by the Defrag.

Second: Do the same thing to the target drive, as you did the Master: Scandisk then a thorough Defrag.

Third: Right-click on the Target drive and click on Format. When the box comes up, click your mouse onto the "Full" button.
Fourth: After Formatting the Target drive, run a Scandisk again and click on the button that says "Autofix Errors".

Fifth: In this final part, you might want to cut-and-paste to code in, unless you are sure that you can do it without making any mistakes:
Click on the Start => Run... button, then place the following into the Runbox:

XCOPY C:.D: /c/h/e/k/r

and then press the "Enter" button.

If you receive an error message, then remove the space from between XCOPY and C:
Anything that should happen to come up in the DOS box, just click "Y" for "Yes". When its all finished, pull the original Master from the system, designate the Slave as the Master (change your jumpers), then check your new Master out.

Please note:This trick has been tested (and worked) on all systems except for Windows 2000, so you really shouldn't have any problems.