How to Clone Windows With Macrium Reflect Free

This is a more condense and specific to just cloning your hard drive to another hard drive and booting it.

In my other video, I used other specific features such as cloning your drive to a larger drive and backing up your drive to an ISO.

If this video does not help you then check out my other video here:

http://youtu.be/BWM79HCzdDA

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Closed Caption:

hey what's up r 1 John of the geek here
today we're going to be cloning my
failing hard drive onto a brand new hard
drive using this
macrium reflect software and so this is
kind of a follow up video or another
video to a previous one that I had that
had a different purpose and as a little
bit more in depth and i'll explain what
you get out of that other video versus
this one here and so basically what i'm
going to be doing is that I'm going to
be cloning straight up copying my
failing hard drive to the new hard drive
and then booting up the new hard drive
and then going from there basically two
straight up a clone
it's very simple and straightforward
we're on the macrium website here and
i'm going to go ahead and download the
free version
there was a comparison chart there for
you know what you get out of the pro
versions definitely looked at over if
this is something that you want to
continue using as well as many different
features and so we're on the
download.com here this is where they're
kind of given a the way given away the
program and so once it downloads and
download the smaller files not the
actual file yet
instead we are going to go ahead and
choose what we want here we're going to
do the free trial version right and then
it's going to just go ahead and download
and start the installation process after
it's finished downloading that's not
that large of a file so we'll just go
ahead and breathe through this real
quick
all right so it starts up the
installation process now we can go ahead
and click on next
will click on next again click on accept
the agreement click on next and you
could register the software now if you
want but i'm going to skip that for now
and then we'll click on next and install
all right so after the installation
process is finished you can go ahead and
start the program up and actually began
doing the cloning process but i'm going
to actually show you how to initialize
your hard drive
if you plug it in your computer your
windows operating system should
recognize the the hard drive and it
should be able to install it but i'm
going to go ahead and run computer
management and then we're going to click
on disk management and since this is the
first time your hard drive has been
recognized by windows
it's going to ask you if you want to
initialize the disc and i'm going to go
ahead and say ok I'm gonna choose a
master boot record you could however if
you wanted to choose a GID partition
table
that's a little bit complicated and
that's only in the case of when your
insulation your original hard drive here
has a new ID partition table
most likely it'll probably won't have
that but again this particular step
you may not even need to have to do this
right but i'm just going to show you
just in case you were to run into some
problems where the macro and reflect
program didn't recognize your hard drive
for some reason or didn't see your hard
drive
this is one of ways to troubleshoot it
so we're going to go ahead and that's
pretty much it you don't have to create
a volume or anything like that
you can leave it on allocated here
windows itself doesn't really see a hard
drive but the macro reflect program
should but i just wanted to show you how
to
initialize the actual hard drive there
and so once you start up this program
it's gonna might ask you to create a
rescue media we're not going to do that
right now
and so now that we have this option here
clone this disc
we're going to go ahead and it tells you
right here here's your source this is
your main hard drive here with Windows
operating system on it
we're going to choose select disk to
clone the only other option I have is
the new hard drive that's in there and
if you're unsure about you know what all
of these serial numbers or model numbers
mean
and you have other hard drives in your
computer
unplug those before you do any of this
right you don't want to accidentally
overwrite your hard drive with very
important data on it and clone over it
right so that would be a bad thing right
now I only have two hard drives to be
playing around with so that's all I that
the only options that I got here and
once you select it
pretty much click on next and finish and
now it's going to copy over everything
and depending on how much data you have
and if your main hard drive here is you
know slow it was going to determine
that's going to turn determine how long
it's going to take for this to copy over
all right ladies and gentlemen that's
pretty much it
the copy has completed without any
problems
your computer might pop up here saying
it's recognized some hard drive that's
your new hard drive here the clone
completed in
what is that 14 minutes 20 seconds which
is pretty quick
there wasn't a whole lot of data on this
particular hard drive here and once
that's finished the program just going
to go through and restart again and here
we have two hard drives here that are
exactly the same
now what do you do basically there's a
couple of options here
one in Mike particular situation
I'm going to unplug my failing hard
drive take it out of the computer reboot
the computer and that's pretty much it
little boot up on its own right
it will boot up on its own and i'll be
ready to go because it's the only hard
drive in there
the other complicated way is if i were
to keep that old hard drive in there for
whatever reason you can do that at home
I'd have to go into the bios here and
i've restarted my computer and I'm
hitting delete on the keyboard to try to
go into the bios here i have to specify
the computer the bios to boot my new
hard drive right because both of them
are plugged in there and when it starts
up its going to want to boot your old
hard drive right we don't want that
so for the purpose of demonstration
let's go into let's see here hard disk
boot priority and right now here is the
very first one is my old hard drive and
its designated by the st 3500 I kind of
know it's my old one because the new one
here
I know for a fact that it's a western
digital drive and the the designation is
the wdc and WD 500 that's a 500 gig hard
drive
western digital so i gotta move this up
right so i press the + key and it's now
the first hard drive to try to boot and
then
what i can do is exit and then exit
again save and exit set up and now it's
going to boot my new hard drive on there
and my old hard drive what am I going to
do with that
well i'll probably either just hold on
to it and you know just in case the new
hard drive doesn't work out for some
reason or you know you get blue screens
or stuff like that
that shouldn't really happen but just in
case I'll keep it around for as long as
i can and so before i leave though I
kind of want to ask answer some
questions that i got from my previous
video and like i said in my previous
video I did things like create an image
and also back up the entire hard drive
so that if something were to happen you
can put in a disk and you boot up the
disc and you can copy and clone from an
external or something that you saved up
and throw it onto your hard drive again
and back everything up more detailed
it's a longer video i did a lot of
talking in that video so if you want to
check that out a link to that will be in
the description and let's see i often
get questions about whether or not you
can do this with a laptop
yes you can you can do this very same
thing so for example if you wanted to if
you got a new hard drive and or new SSD
or whatever and you want to replace the
hard drive in your laptop
you would have to take your new hard
drive since you can't plug it into the
laptop along with your old hard drive
you have to take your new hard drive and
get something like an adapter that plugs
it and turns it into a USB external hard
drive right and then you would do the
same process everything that you was
that you just saw me do and you would
copy it onto your USB external hard
drive with your new hard drive and
there and get everything copied over and
then you do the swap where you take out
your old hard drive but in the new hard
drive and that's pretty much it you boot
it up and everything should be fine
oh and one last thing before I go
if let's say for example you are happy
with your new hard drive here and the
clone was successful and you got your
old hard drive
what do you do with it to wipe it all
out well I have another video where I
use a program called diskpart definitely
check that video out so that you can
wipe out your old hard drive
if you have sensitive data on your old
hard drive that you don't want anybody
to get access to
there's a program called dance boot and
nuke that will wipe out your old hard
drive by making multiple passes on it
and then there's another program called
eraser
that's a windows based program that you
can install on your operating system and
you can choose your old hard drive and
you can erase it properly so that the
data on there can be retrieved or
anything like that even after formatting
it
so definitely check those videos out
thanks for watching and I'll catch you
guys later