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If you’re upgrading to a newer hard drive, or your old hard drive is about to bite the dust, you may be considering cloning it. Cloning your drive will keep all of your old data perfectly intact and ready to use on a brand new hard drive. Follow this guide to learn how.

  1. While the cloning process should not result in any data being lost, it is always prudent to make sure that important files are backed up just in case. Backup your files onto a removable drive, DVDs, or onto cloud storage services online.
  2. When you clone a drive, you copy the existing drive to a new one. The new drive needs to be installed before you can clone your existing one.
    • The new drive does not need to be formatted in order to clone to it.
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  3. In order to clone a hard drive, you need to install special software to do it. You can either buy professional software such as Norton Ghost, or download a freeware program such as HDClone. This guide will cover how to use both.
  4. From the main menu, select Ghost Advanced, and then click the Clone button.
  5. Burn the HDClone image file to a CD so that you can boot from it. When you boot from the CD, a DOS interface will load.
  6. Once you’ve verified that the cloning process has been successful, power down your computer and remove your old hard drive entirely. Make sure that your jumper settings are set correctly on the new drive.
  7. Ensure that everything boots normally and functions as it should. If your hard disk is not detected, make sure that your jumper settings are set to Master on the hard drive. Once you know that everything is working OK, you can put the old drive back in and format it.
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      Warnings

      • Make sure you copy in the right direction. Nothing is worse than copying a blank drive to your existing drive and losing all your data!
      • If continuing to use the old computer, don't violate your license agreements
      • If continuing to use the old computer on the same network, you may have IP address conflicts.
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