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General discussion

Cloning Win 7 from Internal HDD to Larger External

Aug 19, 2015 8:23PM PDT
As the 2.5" internal HDD of my ThinkPad T60 is running out of space (maybe there's not enough for a Win 10 upgrade), how can I move or copy the pre-installed Win 7 - Home Premium (in addition to other data that was added to the drive) from the 66.6GB internal drive to my external 120GB drive (temporarily in a 2.5" usb enclosure)?
I don't have a setup disk for Win 7.

Discussion is locked

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First
Aug 19, 2015 9:53PM PDT
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Just a tip
Aug 22, 2015 12:04PM PDT

I can see that you've previously asked about creating restore media so presume you were not successful in doing so. I also see in this post that you want to clone "temporarily". I wonder why the temporary need as you cannot run Windows from the external drive.

I have run into an issue with such cloning in that you may not be able to clone to an external and then move the larger drive to the laptop. Your chance of success is greater if you put the smaller laptop hard drive into an external enclosure, replace the laptop's hard drive with the larger one and clone in that direction. When I do this, I prefer to just create an image of the laptop's hard drive on an external, put in the new drive and restore the image to it. There is one caveat that may not apply to all laptops but has to do with the recovery partition. I have found it better to not resize that partition. If your software wants to resize both proportionally...which is often the default...do not do this. Keep the recovery partition in its original size. That will give you more usable room on the larger drive and might prevent issues later if you need to use that recovery partition. I don't know why this sometimes happens but such as been my personal experience. Good luck.

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What I meant by "temporary"
Aug 24, 2015 8:31AM PDT
As I was using the term "temporary", I was talking about "temporarily" having the 120GB drive as an external drive. IOW, I am planning to transfer what is currently on my 66.6GB internal to the 120GB external, after which I want to let the 120 become my internal drive.

Thank You,

--David