By Achilles Hill | Last Updated
In this passage, we are going to study how to clone failing hard drive to an external hard drive in Windows 10. As we all know, a hard drive on laptops and desktop computers is used to store data. Have you ever received any sign implying that something not good happened to your hard drive? These hints can be: frequently sudden system crashes, extremely slow start-up of computer, corrupted files or folders, abnormal noises from hard drive, Windows unable to boot up… All of these are the exact signals of a failing hard drive. If you are confronted with these signals, unfortunately, you are reminded to repair the hard drive or change a new hard drive.
However, before you decide to fix the failing hard drive or replace the failing hard drive with a new hard drive, you have one more important thing to do – transfer data from the failing hard drive to a safer place to prevent data loss. As we all know, a failing hard drive lets you take the risk of losing data every second and every minute. So in order to avoid fatal failure, you'd better back up all the data to another place as soon as possible. Here comes the point. You can choose to clone the failing hard drive to an external hard drive to ensure data security. Well, if the failing hard drive is the Windows system disk and you can't boot up your computer, how to clone the failing hard drive? Don't worry. All of these questions will be discussed in this essay.
Why we need to clone a failing hard drive? As what we have mentioned above, a hard drive is used to save data in computers. If you have the Windows system installed on the drive, it is also used for Windows booting. You hard drive will face a lot of issues after being used for a long time, such as bad sectors, missing files, frequent freezes, and so on. All of these are about "hard drive failing".
With a failing hard drive, you cannot work with it stably and smoothly. Sometimes even you can't access the disk. Under this circumstance, how do you get data from the hard drive when you are in need? More seriously, if the failing hard drive is the disk where you have the Windows OS installed, you may not even be able to boot up your computer. That would drive you crazy. Therefore, no matter from which perspective, it is very necessary for you to clone a failing hard drive if you do have a failing hard drive in your computer.
What do you need to prepare for cloning failing hard drive to an external hard drive in Windows 10? To clone a failing hard drive to an external hard drive, you need to do the following necessary preparation jobs in advance so that you can execute the operations smoothly.
1. A new or an empty external hard drive. As what you want to do is to clone a failing hard drive to an external hard drive, first of all, of course you have to prepare a new external hard drive to receive all the data from the failing hard drive. And the hard drive you prepare must have bigger space than your current failing hard drive. However, if you want to use a hard drive that is used before, you should back up all the data in it as the cloning process will format the target drive.
2. The Windows computer with a failing hard drive. If you want to clone the failing hard drive, make sure you have the Windows computer around you. During the cloning process, you need to use the failed hard drive in the Windows computer as the source disk, so that you can transfer all the data from the hard disk (the failing hard disk) to the target disk (the external hard disk).
3. A Windows disk cloning software. How to clone a failing hard drive in Windows 10? To clone a failing hard drive to an external hard drive, it means to transfer everything to that drive, including the Windows OS, installed applications and other personal files. To avoid data loss, it is a good idea to use a reliable disk clone software to help you. To save you time, iSunshare CloneGo is strongly recommended to you. You can use it to clone a failing hard drive to another hard drive successfully.
4. A USB disk to make a bootable disk. If your Windows computer couldn't boot up and you can't access the computer due to the failing hard drive, how can you clone the failing hard drive? In this situation, you cannot directly download iSunshare CloneGo and complete the cloning process in your Windows computer. But you could clone a failing hard drive in WinPE with a bootable disk with iSunshare CloneGo. To create a bootable disk, you need a USB disk.
5. Another accessible Windows computer. We have mentioned that if the failing hard drive is the system disk and your computer can't boot, you need clone the failed hard drive in WinPE with bootable disk. To create bootable disk, you need insert the USB disk to another available Windows computer running the same Windows OS. So you also need to prepare an accessible Windows computer before you start.
Notice: If your failing hard drive is a non-system disk and you can boot your computer without problems, you can directly download iSunshare CloneGo on you current and use it to clone the failing hard to an external hard drive. In that case, you don't have the need to prepare Point 4 and Point 5 mentioned above as you don't have to rely on another computer to create a boot disk and clone the failing hard in WinPE.
Here comes to the point! In this part, you will learn how to clone failing hard drive to an external hard drive in Windows 10. Depending on the degree of your hard disk failing, you are illustrated with two different solutions to clone a failing hard drive in Windows 10. As you can see in the following content, we will discuss this problem according to different situations: Situation 1 and Situation 2. You should apply different solution according to different situations. Anyway, no matter which situation, iSunshare CloneGo will help you solve all your problems. So download and install it on your Windows computer without hesitation!
If the failing hard drive is the system disk of your computer and your computer fails to boot up, you can use iSunshare CloneGo to help you create a boot disk with a USB disk in another accessible Windows computer. In that way you can clone a failing hard drive to an external hard drive in WinPE. Now follow the below steps to learn how to do it:
1. Insert the USB disk to an available Windows computer.
2. Run iSunshare CloneGo and click the button of "Make Boot Disk" on the top right of the interface.
3. Click the option of "Select WIM file to make PE" to proceed.
4. Tap the "Download" button to download the WIM file online, and then extract the WIM compressed file to a local path and click the "Add" button to select the winpe.wim file. After that, hit "OK" to continue.
5. Select your USB disk and click the "Make" button in order to make a boot disk. Then click "Yes" to confirm".
6. Wait for the process to complete and you will get the WinPE bootable USB disk created successfully.
Connect the new external hard drive to the accessible Windows computer and go to Disk Management and initialize the external hard drive. Then right click the unallocated space and choose New Simple Volume to create at least one volume for the external hard drive.
In this step, you need connect the USB boot disk and the initialized external hard drive to the unbootable Windows computer. Then boot your computer from the USB boot disk. If you don't know how to boot your computer from the USB boot disk, you can refer to this passage. After you boot successfully, the user interface of iSunshare CloneGo will show up automatically.
1. Select the function of "Disk Clone" and then choose the failing hard drive as the source disk and then external hard drive as the target disk.
2. Click "Start" and "Yes" to make sure to clone the failing hard drive to external hard drive.
3. Finally, you will get the failing hard drive cloned to the external hard drive successfully.
If the failing hard drive is a non-system disk and you have no problems in booting your computer, you can clone the failing hard drive to an external with the help of iSunshare CloneGo directly in your current computer. Below are the instructions:
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