To clone or not to clone?

I have a 3 month old dell computer and the hard drive is going bad.  

It still functions properly and operates correctly but diagnostics say it’s failing and dell sent me a new hard drive to replace it

Reading the manual for Acronis True Image WD edition, it looks like I should clone the C: drive and then copy it to the new drive once i have it installed…is that correct?

the C drive has 535 GB on it, I have an external drive with 576 GB available so I plan to clone the C drive to that external

is that all i need to do?

Dell hasn’t been much help…they sent the replacement without any instructions at all just a return shipping slip and i have 9 days to return the bad drive to them.

I can replace the drive but just want to make sure that I copy the C drive data properly to the external so that I can quickly get it added to the new C drive once it’s installed…i have a feeling it could take awhile to reinstall all of that data

thanks for any guidance

Hello,

You have to clone the main drive on your computer to the drive Dell has sent you. 

I recommend that you contact them directly for assistance on this issue. You can also contact WD support to verify if they can help you with this.

http://support.wd.com/contact/contact.asp?lang=en