In case your hard drive is still working and you only want to make clone for the purpose of backup, you can download 'Macrium REFLECT' directly to your machine and install to make backup. STEP 1: Download and Install 'REFLECT' to appropriate machine I was ignoring my HDD signs of failing and finally today it gave up and refused to start, though I had taken full backup few days ago but it is now not very recent and hence I decided to recover data, but my laptop won't boot and sadly today I don't have any linux live cd so that I can use it for rescue so I decided to take it out and attach it to another to make clone and then restore to new hard drive I just purchased. I looked into other options as there are plenty of freeware to do all this, I zeroed to Macrium Reflect Free, they do have professional paid version, so if you are going to use it for commercial purpose then considering buying it.įree version comes with following features and those were sufficient for my need. You can download it free : Macrium Reflect FREE Tool Download.

I have done it few times in linux but today I am talking about using a free windows XP / 7 tool which very easy to use and practical and above all its free for personal use. This laptop runs Windows 7, though when I got to know that I need to change my hard disk as soon as possible, I thought of using Linux as it comes with good tools as well as if you are comfortable with command line then there is command like dd can be used to make clone of your drive easily, you can even make image then restore later or can do direct clone if both (destination and source) drives are connected to computer. If you want to know if you hard disk drive is about to fail then you can read my other TIP In my case, it was having hard time to read data, sometimes system freezing for no apparent reason. Now if you have question how do I know my hdd is dying then its easy, it gives you signs that its about to fail and also if you are using your computer a lot and your hdd is more than few years old then even on safe side you should consider changing, swapping your hard disk. Recently, my old laptop started giving sign that its hard disk drive is about to die.

Macrium reflect cloning tutorial