Thinkpads Forum

Is there a reliable way to clone the HD in my w510 by hooking up to an external USB 3.0 drive?

I've had good results from the Acronis Disk Director utility in cloning drives. You'll want a fairly recent version. You'll need to boot from a drive other than the drive you're cloning; Acronis lets you make such a CD.

You mention USB 3.0. I don't believe the W510 had USB 3.0, did it? You may have difficulty if you're using a ExpressCard USB 3.0 adapter and booting from a CD that won't have a driver for the card. Haven't tried that myself. My preference is to use eSATA whenever possible because I have less to worry about with no USB->SATA bridge possibly confusing the software.

I have in the past used both Clonezilla and Easus utilities when migrating to larger HDDs they have worked fine for me. Easus however helped me clone a HDD with bad sectors, it gave me the option to ignore those sectors and clone the rest. Try them out.