How to Duplicate a Hard Drive
- 1). Purchase a Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive. Any standard hard drive size, including 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch, provides an acceptable size for duplication.
- 2). Purchase a SATA external hard drive docking station. Place the bare hard drive into the docking station cradle, matching up the male and female SATA connections. Connect a USB cable from the SATA docking station to a computer USB port.
- 3). Format the hard drive. Use the same format type used on the source hard drive such as NTFS, FAT or FAT32. To verify the format type on the source drive, open the hard drive in “My Computer” and click the right mouse button while the hard drive is selected. Select “Properties”. The hard drive formatting is labeled next to “File System”. Use the software that came with the hard drive to format the drive.
- 4). Purchase and install hard drive duplication software. The software chosen must allow full cloning of the original source hard drive. Some popular software titles that are capable of this feature include Norton Ghost, Arcronis True Image Home, DriveImage XML or HDClone.
- 5). Begin duplication of the hard drive. Follow the specific steps of the duplication software to complete the clone of the source hard drive.
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