Sometimes the decision to purchase a new laptop comes after becoming frustrated with using the old one due to extreme slowness. Upgrading components like PC hardware is not possible, so you are forced to buy a new laptop altogether. Buying a new laptop is truly wonderful as you enjoy a powerful performance and a better experience, but the problem remains – how will you transfer all your data from the old laptop to the new one? You cannot work on the new device until this data is transferred. Well, let me tell you that there are many ways you can use, and in this article, I will talk about the method I used.
Recently, I purchased a new laptop, so I was looking for the best and fastest way to transfer all the data from the old laptop’s hard drive to the new one, both of which have HDD type hard drives. The method I used was “Cloning the Hard Drive” and the writer Mahmoud Monir presented the idea in his article “Transferring Windows from the old hard drive to the new SSD”, where you connect both hard drives to a computer and then copy all data from one disk to the other in the same disk order with everything else.
Initially, after buying the new laptop, all you need to do first is to install a program that can help you in cloning the hard drive on the new laptop. There are many options available, but I preferred using the “MiniTool Partition Wizard” program for its ease of use and efficiency in performing the operation.
Secondly, you need to remove the hard drive containing the data from the old laptop in order to connect it to the new laptop. There are many ways to do this. I had a method available to me to connect the hard drive to the laptop using a USB SATA/IDE Adapter, which I reviewed in the article “How to Convert an Internal Hard Drive to an External Hard Drive for Only $10!” I also had another option, which is the HDD/SSD Caddy, a tool that I also reviewed in the article “Installing an Additional HDD/SSD for a Laptop even if it does not support it”, where it turns the CD drive into an extra space for the hard drive. If the new laptop has an internal slot for an additional hard drive, then you can directly install the hard drive of the old laptop in it.
In my case, I used the second method, which is using the HDD/SSD Caddy tool. I removed the hard drive from the old laptop and installed it in the HDD/SSD Caddy tool, then installed it in the new laptop to replace the CD/DVD drive. Once that was done, the new laptop had two connected hard drives that were working normally. The new hard drive was empty, while the old hard drive contained the data. Now, I will transfer the data from this old hard drive to the new laptop’s hard drive after running the program MiniTool Partition Wizard, where I selected the hard drive containing the data that I want to clone, then clicked on the “Copy Disk” button on the top.
You will see the Copy Disk Wizard window appears, and you click on Next. It will ask you to select the disk you want to copy and transfer the data from the old hard drive to the other hard drive. I selected the old hard drive Disk 2, and then clicked Next to move to the next step.
In this Select target Disk step, you will be asked to select the target hard drive where you want to add the data after transferring it from the old hard drive. I selected the first disk Disk 1 then clicked Next, but keep in mind that the target hard drive must be completely empty, so the MiniTool Partition Wizard program will format this disk. But how? The target disk is the new laptop’s hard drive with a Windows system installed on it, so how will it work after formatting? Well, the program operates outside of the Windows operating system when performing the cloning process, so the cloning process will be carried out smoothly without any problems.
You will now see the Review Changes window. In the Copy Options section, you will find two or four options that are important before clicking Next.
You can select the Fit partitions to entire disk option if you want the program to utilize the entire space of the target hard drive to store the old hard drive files. The Copy partitions without resize option can be selected when the target hard drive has a larger space than the old hard drive, so you can make the program take the same sizes of the partitions of the old hard drive and apply them to the new or target hard drive. The best option for me was to select the Fit partitions to entire disk option.
If the target hard drive is an SSD type, you will see other options such as Align partitions to 1MB, and I recommend selecting this option to maintain the performance of the SSD hard drive during cloning. You can also select the Use GUID partition table for the target disk option if you want to convert the target hard drive from MBR to GPT, which is useful if the target hard drive is larger than 2 terabytes.
After selecting the appropriate choice, click Next, then Finish. The new changes will appear, and you will notice that the partitioning of the old hard drive is the same as the partitioning of the new hard drive, with each section containing the files it originally had. Thus, the laptop’s hard drive now contains the same files and Windows copy that were installed on the old laptop. To apply this in reality, press the Apply button and from the confirmation message – which notifies you to close any open programs before starting the process – click Yes. The program will then transfer the data and clone the old hard drive to the new one, so let it do its job until the process is complete. After that, you can remove the old hard drive from the new laptop and reinstall it in the old one, so now the files have been transferred from the old laptop to the new one.
This is the method I tried, and it was easier than copying and pasting the files from the old hard drive to the new one and reinstalling a new copy. As for the drivers, I installed them without any problems, and now the device is running on the same data that was on the old laptop.
