I am planning on cloning a 120 gig win 7 to two 500 gig hdds all sata using a cloning dock with off line cloning. Can I connect the dock to the PC via usb to make sure the OS detects and runs the cloned drive? Using MASTER or TARGET slot? Or use an external enclosure? The pc in question is an HP elite 8000 cmt. Win 7 pro 32 bit.
Only if pc boots from usb..However since your only cloning windows there should be no reason why it won't boot once the job is completed & the 500 is installed into the pc..One more thing why are you cloning for instead of creating an image,as not only is it faster to deploy & recover,it's also a better way & saves space..As for cloning to 2 different drives,i'm not sure how the activation thing will like it,if there's a bs notice at anytime just run daz loader aka as windows loader
I do this often using TODO BACK UP. I felt a dock/clone would do the same job, and I can use the dock or an external enclosure to test the clone provided win 7 detects the clone. In this way I will have "prepared" hdds ready in the event I need one. The case stays closed until I need to replace the drive. The cover is not easily accessed.
Test the clone ? what is that.There's only one way to know if it worked & that's to physically put it in the computer & run it.If your talking about verify you can't trust that either..Creating images is what i do now,i don't bother with cloning any longer simply because it gives me more options & multiple versions of different snapshots of any one time.At some point however i then start creating weekly throw away images & i replace the oldest to the newest,all the while i have a number of what i call base images (not to be deleted) .Where if i have to i can reinstall either a image of just windows,or an image of windows with a few updates & a little bit of software or right up to a full blown install with everything installed.Its at that point i start creating images i don't need,hence they get overwritten after a time.The images are on multiple hdd's in case of hdd failure.That's what i like about images,they don't take up as much space as a full clone.More space can be saved by turning off the page file then rebooting then creating an image,tho i usually boot to safe mode first & do a defrag
"doesn't make sense for win 7 to detect the clone" when you want to boot using it's own os. I don't clone or image my drives as I just copy & paste the data I want saved then do a fresh install of windows. this way for me it reduces the possibility of corruption being on the clone or image.
think this may be overcomplicating things here.i clone my existing hdd in its healthy state to my backup hdd using macrium reflect.if i want to test the clone i simply go into my boot menu and choose to boot from my secondary or backup hdd.i it boots,and i havent had a problem yet,consider it tested.this isnt really that complicated,i have been doing this for years.
