Once there, navigate to Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > choose System image recovery.Ĭonnect the external drive, and choose to recover the PC. To use the System Image, you need to boot the PC into Advanced Recovery using a bootable USB Drive. Once it completes, you can unplug the external drive and keep it safe. Click on Next, confirm the settings, and the system image creation will start.The option shows up when you right-click on it and select Format > NTFS. If that’s the case, you can format the drive to NTFS. The Windows will warn if the drive is not NTFS formatted. Select on a hard disk, and select the external drive or another drive connected to the computer.Once it opens, click on Create a system image link.Then locate the backup or restore your files link.Open Start Menu, and type Control, and then open the Control Panel.Second, make sure to remove any unnecessary files to reduce the time of cloning. Here are the steps to create a System Image Backup:įirst, you have to make sure that the storage device you want to use has enough space for the System Image Backup file. However, you may not be able to use it as a primary drive. Note: This method also works if you want to clone Windows to an external hard drive. While made backup, the ability to create a system image, i.e., sector by sector copy of the original disk, makes it a perfect Clone maker. You can use this feature to make a backup of Windows or to restore a previous version. Windows offers a built-in backup-restore feature that can be used to create a clone of a hard drive. How to Ghost or Clone a Hard Drive on Windows 11/10 In other words, this will allow you to switch the hard drive and restore the PC almost instantly. On the other hand, Clone is a digital copy and can be used at times of disaster recovery. For example, you may copy entire data or your hard disk to another, but you can not boot from it. However, please do not confuse it with backup or copy. Cloning a Hard Drive - What does it mean?Ĭloning means creating a replica of the original. Then there are many free tools to clone a hard drive which I will discuss in this post. While there is no direct feature to clone a hard drive in the Disk Management tool, another method can still be done. Backup is an important part for anyone who uses a computer, but there are times when we need to clone the drive for various reasons.

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