“I suffered a data loss due to the hard drive failure one
year ago. And now I want to copy my internal hard drive to an external hard drive
in Windows OS. How do I transfer everything from my computer to an external
hard drive? Is it possible to clone the hard drive successfully?”
Many Windows users get used to create a backup of the data
in case of data loss for a variety of reasons. But if you back up the PC to the external hard drive, it is inconvenient to access the data as you need to
restore it. Thus, it is a good idea to clone a whole internal hard drive to
external hard drive, which enables you to check the data at any time with any
computer.
To clone a hard drive to external drive, you need the
professional Windows hard drive cloning software. iSunshare CloneGo is highly
recommended here, which can help you to clone hard drive to another hard drive
within several simple clicks. After the
cloning, you can get an identical partition layout.
How to Copy the
Internal Hard Drive in Windows
First of all, you need to get iSunshare CloneGo on your
Windows computer. You can free download and install it within minutes. For the
new users, it offers a free trial of all functions.
Step 1: Connect the external hard drive with the computer.
If there are any other data stored in the external hard drive, you should
create a backup of it. Or you need to get a new external hard drive as the hard
drive clone will wipe all the data on the external hard drive.
Step 2: Launch iSunshare CloneGo and tick Disk Clone option
on the left menu.
On this interface, you can know how many disks are connected
to the computer and how many volumes are detected by the software. Each volume
is marked with the total space and available space.
Step 3: Select the source disk—the internal hard drive, and
the target disk—the external hard drive. Also, if the computer is stored with a
large number of data, you can check the After Finish box and choose
Shutdown/Restart/ Hibernate.
Step 4: Click the Start button and you will know that this
operation will format the data on the external hard drive. If you want to go
ahead, click the Yes button and the data will be cloned to the external hard
drive instantly.
After the cloning, you will get the identical partitions on
the external hard drive. If you want to test whether the OS configurations,
settings, and data can be bootable or not, you can try to boot the computer from
the external hard drive.
Tips:
- If you want to resize the external hard drive after cloning process ends, you can open Disk Management and then extend or shrink the volume. Also, you can add new simple volume from the unallocated space.
- It is better to clone the disk with the same partition styles, such as Clone GPT disk to GPT disk.
- The external hard drive should be larger than the internal hard drive; otherwise, it is impossible to clone the disk.
- You can also use the Disk Clone feature to clone an HDD to an external SSD for computer upgrade.
Related Articles:
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- How to Clone MBR Disk to GPT Disk in Windows 10
- 2 Ways to Clone SSD to Samsung SSD in Windows 10
- How to Transfer Files from One Computer to Another Computer in Windows
- How to Replace HP Laptop Hard Drive with SSD without Reinstalling Windows
