On 01/11/19, Charles Stephenson said the following...

 CS> I am trying to figure out how can I transfer information from one HDD

 CS> that's in my laptop, to another HDD, that I plan on replacing the
 CS> current one in my laptop with.
 CS> 
 CS> Is there something I can buy to make the HDD active, able to transfer
 CS> files to?

Depends on what is the type of drives you use.

Let's say both are SATA, you have multiple options.

There is drive duplicators, which I also use to mount ad-hoc drives and such.
The price vary between 40$ and 100$. You plug both drives vertically and you
can either mount them or copy the source to the target within a computer.
There is duplicators from various interface types too.

If it is SATA, you can always buy an USB to SATA adapter. These are cheap and
only cost a few bucks. Then use dd to create an image and write the image on
the new drive. I you can have both drives connected at the same time, making a
direct copy is good too. It requires the target is exactly the same or larger.

You would them use something like: dd if=/dev/drive1 of=/dev/drive2 bs=4M

If the target is smaller, you have to do additional steps to reduce the file
system on the source first before copying it on the target. This step is
advanced and working on your original source drive can cause loss of data if
something goes wrong.

You could create an image (with dd) and mount that image as a loop device,
then do the partition changes on the image before writing it to the target.
I've never really done it myself but this could theoretically be possible to
do so. 

I hope that helps you with your problem.

Cheers!

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