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Showing results for tags 'clone windows hard drive'.
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I want to clone my entire internal Windows hard drive to an external hard drive, and have it bootable and fully function on the external. I am not looking to mearly create a recovery drive, I want everything not simply the recovery partition. I have been getting things needed lined up to do this. A few days ago, I found via the Help menu how to do this - but for the life of me, I have just spent hours and can't find how to do that now. All I can find no matter what search terms I use is how to make a recovery drive. That simply a 16 GB volume, but I saw a few days ago that to do the entire hard drive on my machine, it woudl be 98 GB, and I now have an external hard drive to handle that, with a 110 GB volume to do it to. I plan to go up to Windows 10 at some point, and I want a full Windows 8.1 hard drive on the side, and want to be able to erase Windows 10 and clone back over from the external drive - so I have everything there. I otherwise have no install disk, so if I go up to Windows 10 and don't want it, I can't get back to 8.1 -- the problem of downloading OSs, or using only what the machine came with, instead of having a full install disk. In Mac, you have to actually clone if you want it bootable. I don't know if that is or is not necesary in Windows, maybe simply copying is all that is needed, or maybe I have to do it with a disk image, or??? (Mac has invisible files that are necessary to the boot that do not come over in a copy, you must do a clone to get them.) Anyway, how do I accomplish this on Windows 8.1? I have now gotten the hard drive all set up, parttioned, formatted, ready to go - and I can't go. Thanks for any help.
