On the off chance that your Master Boot Record gets corrupted, you’ll be able to pop in the Windows repair disc and fix it in a matter of minutes. Check out our guide to backing up your computer, and make sure you have a full backup of your important data before continuing. A backup of your data. Even though you’re copying your drive, we recommend having a backup before you start big, data-writing processes such as this one.

Its free version has all the features we need to accomplish the task in front of us, so download the free version and install it like you would any other Windows program. (2.5″ drives will not need this.) You can also install your new drive in an external hard drive enclosure before you start the migration process, though that’s a bit more time consuming. If you’re using a laptop, however, this usually isn’t possible, so you’ll need to buy something like a SATA-to-USB cable (shown right), which will let you connect a hard drive to your laptop via USB. If you’re upgrading a mechanical 3.5″ hard drive with spinning platters, and you want to use a SATA-to-USB wire, it will need to have an external power source. Something like this model should be more than enough to accommodate any kind of drive you throw at it. If you have a desktop computer, then you can usually just install your new hard drive alongside your old hard drive in the same machine to clone it.

A way to connect both hard drives to your computer.

Before you begin, you’ll of course need your new hard drive, but there are a few other things as well:

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