Cloning my hard drive

I have my new m11x. I have a hard drive that did not come with the m11x. I have put the hard drive in my m11x, installed windows 7 on it, and it works fine. What I want to do, however, is use the original hard drive that came in my m11x and make an exact replica of it onto my second hard drive. I have an external hard drive docking station (connects via USB) which has worked flawlessly in the past. My problem is that I can't find a program that does what I want.

I've tried Macrium. It makes an image of my 1st hard drive and puts it on my 2nd hard drive. But the files aren't there. Just a single file, a single backup image. I tried booting from it, comes up with error "BOOTMGR not found". So it's not bootable (if it's not bootable it's no good to me)

I want both of my hard drives to have the exact same files on them, and basically for me to not be able to tell the difference between them in a blind test. I want EVERYTHING on my m11x hard drive to go onto my extra hard drive. I thought this would be a simple process, obviously I am missing something. I don't want to create an image or backup file or any other , I just want to be able to take my current hard drive out, pop this second (cloned) drive in, and pick up exactly where the old one left off.

I have also tried the programs xxclone (gave me errors as I went into the advanced settings and clicked "make bootable") and I tried Shadow Copy, error "Could not initialize Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS). Make sure VSSVC.exe is running in your TaskManager" - it was there, and running, so idk the problem is there.

If anyone can give me a simple, free program that can accomplish what I am looking for, I would greatly appreciate it. If you can't tell from my post, I've been struggling with this all day and it is starting to get to me. I know I must be doing something wrong, making a hard drive clone shouldn't be this difficult!!! ugh please help!! thanks

edit - sorry, not macronis, macrium reflect

 

Clonezilla


Download the live version.

It can use an USB flash drive to boot into a liveOS that clones one HDD to another, raw (no fancy things, just a simple, bit for bit copy).

 

The acronis disk close tools works well for me.

 

Acronis True Image.

You can download a trial version that works for 30 days, or buy the full version (which is well worth it if you plan on doing more drive imaging in the future).

 

Thanks. I followed all the instructions on their site, but when I tried to boot into the liveOS on my thumbdrive it gave the error "No default or UI configuration directive found"

any ideas?

 

Just use acronis. Clonezilla is rather old, but since Acronis has a free trial for 30days, it's more than enough for a simple, onetime HDD clone. I originally didn't recommend acronis since I knew it was not freeware, but the trial changes everything.

I'm sorry for not following up sooner.

 

No problem. I found out that I actually made a stupid mistake extracting the files. Clonezilla is running as I type this, I'll see how it all turns out. IF something comes up again I will definitely try Acronis

 

ugh, Clonezilla completed successfully. Went to boot from my newly cloned hard drive and I get another damn error about a recent hardware change or whatever, not able to boot. Trying acronis now....