I cloned a hard drive for the first time.

My main hard drive, a FUJITSU MHZ2160BH G2, originally for my Thinkpad R61 before it died (thanks to its iGPU), is slow. The read and write speeds are around 30MB/s, which is terrible. Plus, the hard drive has a single bad sector which "moved to the spare area."

I had some PC hard drives lying around, and I was thinking about using one of them as my main instead. No, I do not have SSDs, at all, and I can't have one.

I remembered that there is something called Disk Cloning, thanks to me watching a random YouTube video about a rescue disk, so, I wanted to give it a try.

Now, the rescue disk is called "Hiren's Boot CD", and no, I'm not talking about the Windows 11 PE, but the original disk with a GRUB/DOS menu. I booted into its "Mini Windows XP" and ran Clonedisk. The software has plenty of choices, like cloning into an image, or into another disk.

Of course, I chose disk to disk, but first, I decided to format the second hard drive entirely, then set up the cloning process.

It had taken almost an hour, which, I guess it wasn't bad for around 110GB of data, and an around 50MB/s transfer. It felt like magic seeing both of the hard drives having the exact same partitions and files. It even kept the labels.

I booted into the second hard drive alone, and the GRUB menu appeared, which is impressive. I chose the Windows installation, and, it hanged? I restarted, chose the Linux installation (which won't boot successfully anyway because I'm using a different PC now), then I restarted and chose the Windows installation once again. It booted fine! I guess this had to do with the hibernation file.

I had to increase the sizes of the partitions. This has taken around 7 minutes each partition (the amount are 4, with the Windows partition process being faster?)

And done! I'm currently doing a bad sector scan as of writing just to be sure the disk is fine. (Edit: no bad sectors.)

So, yeah, cloning disks is something I should do when my hard drive is close to dying.

I don't have photos for all of the progress, but I only have this from cloning the disk using Hiren's Boot CD.