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From: "J. P. Gilliver (John)" 
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Subject: Re: Cloning a 2.5" IDE/PATA Laptop Hard drive
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2017 13:46:04 +0000
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In message , 
james@nospam.com writes:
>I have an old Lenovo t-43 laptop running XP. It has a 40gb hard drive,
>which is too small for my needs. With the OS, and the programs I use,
[]
>80gb hard drive. I found a 160gb drive for $3 more than an 89gb, so I
>bought the 160gb.
>
>I dont have the drive yet, but when I get it, I want to clone the
>current drive to the new one, so I dont have to reinstall everything.
>But how do I do this?
>
>Laptops dont have space for a second HDD. (at least mine dont).

Does it have an optical drive?
>
>I have one of those cable kits that is for hooking any 3.5" IDE or SATA
>drive to a USB port. It dont have the plug for these 2.5" drives, so I
>assume I will have to buy one made for these 2.5" laptop drives.

All the ones I've seen have a plug with two sides to it: one for the 
3.5" drives, and one for the 2.5" drives. (With the ones that do SATA as 
well having the SATA connector in the middle of that plug.) I'd be 
surprised if, if it does SATA, it doesn't also do 2.5".
>
>(Do they sell adaptor kits for these laptop drives?)
>(Are they labeled for these kind of drives)?
>
>Once I buy the adaptor, I think all I have to do is run Partition Magic
>8, (which I have) to clone the drive.

Cloning _from within the OS you're running_ is IMO flaky to do, though 
some utilities (certainly Macrium, I don't know about PM) claim to be 
able to. If you'll be running it on another computer, i. e. just using 
the drive passively, that should be fine.

Make sure you clone C: and any unlettered ("hidden") partitions. (For a 
40G drive, just cloning the whole drive is probably easiest.)
>
>But once it's cloned, will it boot, or do I need to do something to make
>it bootable?

When I did it - though I imaged C: and the hidden to an image on an 
external drive, then restored from that image to the new (bigger) drive, 
rather than cloning - it booted, though the first time some Samsung 
recovery software cut in and offered to run (it's a Samsung netbook), so 
I let it, and after a few minutes my old desktop appeared as before. (I 
then used a partition manager to enlarge C: and recreate D:. It is 
possible I might have been able to do that at the restoring-image stage: 
I just wanted to do one thing at a time.)
>
>But then I was wondering if it's possible to clone the drive to a 64gb
>flash drive, then clone it from the flash drive to the new HDD? The only
>problem there, is that this computer can not be booted from a USB drive,
>so I will probably have to borrow a newer laptop to clone from the USB
>to the new HDD.

Sounds like you only have the one PC, so you would ...
>
>Will that even work?
>
>
But, especially given that you have that cable set, I'd get another 
drive - whatever's cheapest, probably a 3.5" SATA one; that way you can 
image the present drive to the external drive, IMO using a boot CD made 
using Macrium or Acronis so you don't have to do it from inside XP, then 
(again using the boot CD) restore from the image to the new drive: that 
way, you'll still have the external drive to make backup images on in 
future. Always good to make backups! (As I know to my cost! my HD just 
stopped spinning one day; the heads (or probably only one) had stuck to 
the platter, probably due to overheating. Fortunately, when I gave up 
all else and actually opened the drive in a clean cabinet, I was able to 
free them/it, and the drive then worked well enough to extract the 
image.)
-- 
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive, and to do so with
some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style. - Maya Angelou,
quoted by Annabel Nnochiri, in RT 2017/5/13-19
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