Warning! If you clone a disk with Windows to an external USB hard drive, you will not be able to boot from it. Windows does not support booting from external USB hard drives. Please clone to internal SSD or HDD instead.You might find that your hard disk does not have enough space for the operating system and installed applications, preventing you from updating your software or installing new applications. In this case, you have to transfer the system to a higher-capacity hard disk.
To transfer the system, you must first install the new disk in the computer. If your computer doesn't have a bay for another hard disk, you can temporarily install it in place of your CD drive. If that is not possible, you can clone a hard disk by creating a disk image and recovering it to a new hard disk with larger partitions.
Warning! If you clone a disk with Windows to an external USB hard drive, you will not be able to boot from it. Windows does not support booting from external USB hard drives. Please clone to internal SSD or HDD instead.
For best results, install the target (new) drive where you plan to use it and the source drive in another location, e.g. in an external USB enclosure. This recommendation is especially important for laptops.
On program screens, damaged partitions are marked with a red circle and a white cross inside in the upper left corner. Before you start cloning, you should check such disks for errors and correct the errors using the appropriate operating system tools.
We strongly recommend that you create a backup of the entire original disk as a safety precaution. It could be your data saver if something goes wrong with your original hard disk during cloning. For information on how to create such a backup see see Backing up partitions and disks. After creating the backup, make sure that you validate it.
To clone a disk: