How to: Clone your laptop's hard drive

Q. I have a laptop that’s three years old and the hard drive is rapidly filling up. I would like to fit a higher capacity drive and I’ve looked at various online retailers and know the type of drive I need to buy. However, as there is a lot of data on it, is there any way to transfer the contents of my new hard drive directly onto the new one, without reinstalling Windows?

A. It certainly is possible to do what you are asking, but you will need a bit of extra equipment to do it. As well as your new drive, you will need a hard drive imaging program, such as Acronis True Image (£40 from www.acronis.co.uk) and a USB laptop hard drive caddy. A USB caddy for your new drive can be found on eBay for a few pounds. All you then need to do is clone the contents of your old hard drive, onto the drive in the USB caddy, then take out your old drive and put the new one in.

Step 1: Connect your USB drive caddy into a free USB Port on your laptop, and then download, install and start the Acronis True Image software. Once on the application’s Welcome screen, click on Disk Utilities and then click on the Clone Disk icon to start the Disk Cloning operation.

Step 2: On the next screen, select the Automatic option as your chosen Clone Method and then click Next. The next screen will be this one will allow you to select which drive to clone, so select your existing laptop’s hard drive as the source. It should be labelled as Disk 1.

Step 3: The next step is to choose the drive in the USB caddy as the destination for the cloned disk. Your laptop will then reboot and copy the data to the new drive. Once it has finished, swap the drives around and remove any data from your old drive if you wish.