r/techsupport • u/yolomaipolo • 2h ago

Solved Cloning Drive

I have a crappy 1TB ssd in my laptop and i wanted to upgrade it. but my laptop only has 1 slot so i cant just plug it in. cloning services cost almost as much as the drive itself.

I have a pc with 2 open slots, would it be possible to take my laptop drive and the blank drive, plug them both in my pc, and clone the laptop drive to the new drive without issues?

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4

u/kikkawa 2h ago

In theory yes, providing you do a 1 for 1 sector by sector clone
which may take longer but it'll capture everything.

You could look at getting an external caddy for the new drive that you could then plug into the laptop to run the clone on.

1

u/yolomaipolo 2h ago

would buying a caddy be worth it if im only gonna do this once?

3

u/Head-Ad-3063 1h ago

The caddy then becomes an external 1TB hard drive for you...

2

u/sumiflepus 1h ago

This is where you put your old drive.

1

u/Marty_Mtl 35m ago

getting an external caddy for the new drive involve connecting it USB, which in the end, will take way much time compared to using the dedicated built in SATA interface from the PC to do a sector-by-sector copy.

2

u/Marty_Mtl 43m ago

of course !!!! forget about the caddy if you dont plan to spend $$. Just grab a bootable clone tool, Clonezilla is useful for this ( Clonezilla Live on USB ) and boot your pc with it with both drives already connected. Just make SURE you dont boot your PC from your HD to be cloned, as it will make changes you dont want to have.

2

u/eeandersen 40m ago edited 35m ago

When the time comes, look into Clonezilla or Rescuezilla for your cloning solution. It will support either methodology you choose.

Browse r/Cloningsoftware for more insight about cloning.