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So my SSD is dieing, and I've already made several backups of everything important (photo's, music, documents, etc.) on my computer. The good thing is, it's still under warranty so I can get a new one.

Now I have a bit of an issue. I don't want to send the computer store my SSD with all my data on it, so I want to completely wipe it before sending it, and it might possibly take more than a week or more for them to analyse it, and get me a new one.

So I came up with this plan:

I make a similar-sized partition on my hard disk drive (which is still working perfectly fine), and I clone my SSD to this partition. Then I magically set my computer up to boot from this drive, and if all goes well, I can use my computer temporary without SSD.

So my question is: How do I accomplish this.. what software to use and how to set it up?

I already tried this, but I'm very new to cloning drives etc. so I probably did something wrong (I reverted the changes and everything is back to normal). When I would boot windows from the partition, it'd say something like: Windows is unable to find a required drive.

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basically: Set your Primary Disk to your HDD in BIOS, make the "Magic" Partition Bootable, make shure you have the right settings, that the SDD can be mirrored on the HDD. I have never tried to move a Disk only to a partition, but that way it works on whole disks. – EGOrecords Feb 24 at 0:36
@EGOrecords Could I maybe use my external drive (which doesn't have much on it, so I can temporarily store that somewhere else) for this purpose? Or only if I connect it via SATA and not USB? I found that I didn't have much success on this method with partitions so I could try that first. - Most software doesn't support disk to partition cloning, as far as I'm aware. – Jochem Kuijpers Feb 24 at 0:42
A normal Windows installation won't boot from a USB drive, although eSATA should work. – Karan Feb 24 at 2:32
@Karan Why is that? I can boot Linux from a flash drive, why not Windows? – Jochem Kuijpers Feb 24 at 20:08
Don't ask me, ask Microsoft! :) Win8 Enterprise is the first to officially support Windows To Go. – Karan Feb 25 at 6:02

migrated from stackoverflow.com Feb 24 at 0:45

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