Question: What does cloning a hard drive mean? Is it just simply copying over all the “CONTENT” of the hard drive EXCLUDING the operating system, drivers, all the installed programs? or is it copying the ENTIRE hard drive BIT for BIT? Is the cloned hard drive bootable?
I have an external USB hard drive and trying to make a exact copy of my computer system by cloning, so that I can connect the cloned hard drive to another machine and boot into it, or install the cloned disk on another computer system and boot into it. Is this possible? Or am I going about this totally wrong?
What is ghosting a hard drive?
Answer: Cloning a hard drive means to make a duplicate copy of the original source data. This duplicate copy can be either bit for bit which will duplicate EVERYTHING on the disk. Another option is to clone individual partitions, this can be useful if you only want to copy specific data such as an OS or data partition.
If I make a clone of my computer’s hard disk it will be an exact duplicate (of the data that is included. To clone a hard disk you need special software.
Some examples of cloning software:
- Clonezilla, a Linux based cloning utility
- Acronis True Image
- Norton Ghost
Once a drive is cloned you can use it as a bootable device (assuming you copied the bootloader data).
By the sound of it what you are trying to do is not a clone but instead what is called a sync. You want to have data reside on one computer. Then using a portable medium you want to take data to another computer for use. Yet you want both locations to remain identical.
Does that sound accurate?