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This may be paranoid or control freakish but the goal is to preserve and restore the factory state of the HD of a new desktop computer prior to it's first boot.
To avoid accidentally booting from the HD and possibly changing it's state the plan is to pull the HD and put it in another computer as a slave. A boot floppy/CD/Thumbdrive could simplify this but a misconfiguration could result in accidentally booting from the HD. Call it an abundance of caution.
The hope is to have a file in another computer that holds the HD's factory state. A file flexible enough that it could be used transfer that state to any HD that is large enough to hold the data.
To prove that this all works a completely different HD will be installed and booted from when finished. Likely a SSD.
In case it matters the OS of the subject HD is windows 8.1.
At least that's the plan. What flaws can you find with the plan and what software is needed to pull this off?
To sum up all 3 requirements:
- 1 TB source HD unchanged - never booted - never re-partitioned
- Contents of source HD in the form of a file (preferably smaller than 1 TB)
- Destination HD with os in pristine state (most likely on a smaller SSD)
1That's called a disk image or cloning. There is tons of software that will do that, and many are free. You can also do it with a command, like dd in Linux. Start with a Google search on cloning, or use the Super User search box for information here. – fixer1234 – 2015-04-20T03:13:56.170
@fixer1234 I thought a clone required the destination HD be exactly the same size and format as the source. – candied_orange – 2015-04-20T03:35:25.703
In its simplest form, cloning requires a destination drive at least as large as the source drive. However, some software is sparing of space in creating the clone. For example, as Journeyman Geek mentioned, Clonezilla will copy only the used space. Some software will let you restore a clone to a smaller drive. AOMEI Backupper, which whs mentioned, and Paragon Backup and Recovery are two well-known free programs that can do that. – fixer1234 – 2015-04-20T04:43:52.167