Well....

I'm thinking about cloning my Win7 DAW hard drive to a larger capacity SATA drive.

So....I did some research (freeware cloning apps) today and downloaded this free cloning app that does have good reviews for my straight forward cloning purpose.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

A few years ago (with Win7) many were having issues in that the target drive that was cloned now became designated at NOT a genuine Windows copy.
I presume that issue has been resolved by now but don't know if others are still experiencing the problem?

I wallow in ignorance and terrified I'll screw something up in the process.
Any recommendations/suggestions/issues/pitfalls/tips for a coward like myself will be appreciated?

Thanks in advance....

Just clone it and if it asked to be activated just activate.

http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=368775#Post368775

Thanks....
It seems I may have been overthinking it.

Back to it....next topic.

If you haven't done your cloning yet, I can vouch for EASUS cloning and partitioning products. Their clone software worked better for me than the Acronis software that came with the hard drive I bought. Acronis would hang up when it encountered a bad sector on the source drive. I was cloning to replace a drive that was going south with a larger drive.

It's freeware for home use

www.easeus.com

That's good feedback.

I'm still trying to truly grasp the difference between the usage if a Disk Image vs Cloned.
When I have success I'll followup here.

Thanks for chiming in.....

You need to scan your disk for errors before cloning if it is getting errors while cloning. Right click Drive, Properties, Tools, Check Now, reboot.

An image is just saved to another hard drive as a file "my hard drive.img" if you clone it to another drive you can boot it or plug it in to a usb and access all your files.

There is an excellent article from PC World ++ HERE ++.

As Pipeline answered, disk image is all of a hard drive gathered into one file. The file is not usable on its own. A program would have to break the disc image back into its component files and folders and install the components onto a hard drive.

Cloning copies everything between two drives.

Thanks Jim.....going there now.

Pipeline....got it. I'll do the check disk prior to cloning.

A good day to all.......