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clone from an external drive to the internal drive

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shai05276

PCHF Member
Jul 20, 2022
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#1
I currently have a SATA drive SSD drive on my laptop
I want to buy a new laptop with a SATA or NVME SSD
I want to do a CLONE of the whole drive but I do not want to remove the drive from the new computer and connect to the old computer for cloning (afraid and also do not really know how to mess with an NVME drive if I purchase such),
but I want to do the opposite,
connect my current drive to the new computer
The internal drive of the new computer will get a perfect copy of the old drive
Is it possible?

I previously did a reverse operation (from internal to external drive) using the MiniTool Partition Wizard

Is it also possible to clone from an external drive to the internal drive on the computer where the software is installed?
 
#3
Psst Peter - it's a laptop :)

but yes, old drive from old laptop into an external caddy, then clone from that into the new drive on the new laptop.

but there are a few things to consider.
the new laptop will already have a Windows OS installed which you'll be effectively removing and using your old laptop license.
so you may run into activation issues when the old OS suddenly freaks out when it discovers all the new hardware it finds, plus your old license may be an OEM one and can't be transferred.

and the cloning will transfer all your software, but also all your performance issues, Registry rot, cached system downloads and updates, history, etc.

far better to use the new laptop an an opportune time to start afresh. reload all your software again. yes painful, but hobble the new laptop right from the start with crap from the old machine.
 
#5
If you use Macrium & boot from their USB recovery media then you should be able to clone to the new internal hard drive from the connected old hard drive. You may have to manually choose the source & destination drives.
Are both drives the same size/capacity?
 
#7
Then you can drag & drop the partitions from the old drive to the new one & Macrium will automatically extend the C partition when running the copy or you can manually extend the C partition when all partitions are dropped to the new drive - you may have to move the last (recovery) partition (if you have this) to the right then extend the C partition.
 
#8
PeterOz said:
Attach old drive inside new computer and clone
If you have used mini tool before then use that
if not use Macrium Reflect Free
Click to expand...
For the purpose of testing, I inserted an SSD drive using Sata to usb cable into my current computer and I see that the MiniTool Partition Wizard software does not let me clone the external drive into the internal drive, see picture:

1658669238904.png
 
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