How to Clone a Laptop Hard Drive Using Macrium Reflect Free

So you got a new laptop and you want to clone the hard drive? Or maybe you want to make a shadow image of you main laptop HDD for backup purposes? Whatever the reason is, this article will guide you through the steps necessary to clone a laptop's hard drive using Macrium Reflect free edition.

EditSteps

1. 
   1
   Make sure you have an extra hard drive (internal or external) that has the same size as your HDD or larger. If you choose to use an internal HDD, make sure your laptop can support another internal hard drive. Also, you must make sure you can install the new HDD to your laptop.
2. 
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   Download and install Macrium reflect free version^[1]
3. 
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   Plug-in your new HDD to your laptop.
   • If you decided to use an internal HDD, make sure your laptop is turned off, unplugged and remove the battery. Press the power button for 20 seconds before opening anything. You don't want to fry the mother board or the hard drive.
     
4. 
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   Once you made sure you have enough room on the new HDD, open Macrium reflect free version and only select the partitions of the original HDD you want to keep. For example, if you had 3 partitions, you might want to select only the Windows partition if all you want to do is backup the OS. #Click "clone this disk".
5. 
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   This will open another window just select the drive you are copying your current HDD to (the new/target HDD). Click "next" at the bottom of the window and then "finish" and it will copy (a.k.a. Ghost) your HDD.
6. 6
   Try booting from your new HDD (if you choose to ghost a bootable disk).

EditVideo

EditThings You'll Need

• A hard disk drive capable of holding your data (the size of the target HDD must be equal to or larger than the HDD you want to ghost)