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I am running windows 8.1 on my desktop PC, which has two-3TB hard drives installed. The first drive is where windows is installed. It has one NTFS partition labeled "System Reserved", another NTFS partition labeled "(C:)" and some unallocated space which I intend to use for something else, but that's a different story... The second drive is completely blank, with no partitions. Do I have to create a similar partition structure on the second drive in order for the cloning to properly take place? And if so, how do I do that?

I want this second drive to be able to be switched out for the first one in the event of a failure so that I can boot from it without having to restore the contents to a new drive.

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When you clone a hard disk(not a partition but a whole hard disk), the entire partition structure of the second drive is replaced.

If you clone drive A to drive B, then it does (I think) byte for byte.. (with I think hopefully some adjustments for hard drive geometry) and empty space.

I've used Macrium Reflect (it's free by the way), and made say an image of one drive and written it to another, and yeah it writes over the existing structure. But unlike dd, it also makes adjustments for hard drive geometry.. so the hard drives don't have to be the same size. And unlike dd, it takes into account empty space rather than copying it blindly, so you don't need to defrag. There is a question as to whether clonezilla cloning does. I guess it does.

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