How to move your operating system to another hard drive

7. The next prompt will show you either device-image or device-device. Choose Device-Device as we want to clone information from one disk to another. Once you hit enter, there will be a subsequent page for either Beginner or Expert. Choose Beginner. The main window of CloneZilla will ask you to choose where you want to move your disk-copy. There are different options, Disk to Local Disk, Disk to Remote Disk, Part to Local Part, and Part to Remote Part. We are going to want to choose Disk to Local Disk.

8. Now, time to choose the Source Disk that will be copied. Now, if you are like me, I have eight hard drives in my tower and when I did this I was using a Patriot Ignite 480GB drive (after my review, I bought one) so when my list came up I saw two Patriot Ignite 480GB drives and then Serial Numbers. I rebooted my machine, unplugged the new drive, restarted this whole process, and wrote down the serial (last 6 digits) of the old drive. Once I had that, I shut down, plugged in the new machine, and I chose the old machine (out of the two Ignite drives listed) as the Local Source. After you have selected the hard drive choice hit Enter to continue.

8. Once the Source Disk is chosen, we now just have to choose where this is going. If you are like me and have two of the same drives, only one will show up here (as the other one has already been selected). If you are smarter than me and just have two drives, choose your location and press Enter.

9. The screen will go black and you will see text, but do not fret! There will be a lot of warning text on the screen. Essentially, Clonezilla is checking everything for you. It will then prompt you, “Are you sure you want to continue? (y/n)” two times to ensure you want to do this. Now, if you made a backup image of your disk and/or checked that you are using the correct source and destination drive information then you are good to go. Worse comes to worse you have to restore your image and do it again. Hit Yes.

10. Once you hit yes, a screen will pop up to start calculating bitmap files, partition locations, and then it will automatically start copying your information. Now, depending how big the drive is, how much data is on it, and whether you are using all SSDs, IDE SATA drives, or going in either direction depends on how fast this will take. For me, I have about a 110GB worth of data on my drive so this took me about 6 minutes and 33 seconds.

11. Extra step(s) for those who move from a smaller hard drive to a larger hard drive (e.g. 128GB hdd to a 1TB) - once you are done with CloneZilla, choose to power off the machine and remove the old hard drive from your computer. Upon Startup you may have to go into BIOS and select the new drive as a Boot Option in your Boot Priority (mine automatically detects). Once you are in Windows, you will need to go back to Disk Management and you will have to edit how big your C:/ Drive is. The reason for this is that Windows thinks it exists on a smaller hard drive than it currently does, but that is easy to fix. Go to Windows/My Computer, and right-click on My Computer and select Manage and choose Disk Management. Right-click on C:/ Drive hard drive and choose “Extend Partition.” A Window will open up and just follow the prompts. I suggest using all of the disk space that you can and hitting enter.