Copy a hard disk with Clonezilla

Fitting a new hard disk is fairly simple these days and Windows can prepare it for use. The (My) Documents folder can be moved to the new disk but that won't help if the Windows disk is full with software.

Clonezilla can be used to copy the entire contents of the old drive to the new one.

Clonezilla supports all the major operating systems and the way they use hard disks and can work over a network.

As it needs to access all the files on the old hard disk, Clonezilla doesn't work from within Windows. Instead it works as a Linux Live CD. It is also possible to work from a USB key as well. A page on the Clonezilla website explains how to install Clonezilla on different types of media.

Clonezilla has a basic text interface. This keeps the size and requirements down but may be a little offputting if you're used to graphical interfaces. So long as you are careful to read all the options before selecting anything, there should be no problems.

As the disk capacities is used as one of the ways of identifying the disks, it is easy to distinguish between the old and the new. It asked if we were sure about proceeding three times so there is no way it can be accused of not checking.

The cloning process was quite quick for an 80GB source disk and the progress is shown onscreen. After it had finished, we opted to shut the computer down and unplugged the old disc.

Windows requested a restart after it started for the first time but apart from that there was nothing to suggest that we were using the new disk.

This did extend to the amount of space used by Windows so we had an 80GB partition on the new 500GB disk. Thankfully, this is really easy to fix in Windows 7. Click on the Start button and right-click on Computer. Left-click on Manage.

Click on the Disk Management option on the left. Right click on the coloured bar that represents the 80GB disk and click on Extend Volume. Follow the wizard.

We didn't have to make any changes to the settings. The entire disk will now be in use and was ready almost immediately.