Free cloning software for SSD?

perdomot · 02-16-2011, 08:42 AM

Just ordered a Crucial 64GB SSD and want to clone from my current OCZ Agility and keep the aligned partition. Is anyone offering free software that does this?

Gillbot · 02-16-2011, 12:23 PM

Many of the larger tier manufacturers offer cloning suites such as Seagate's DiscWizard but they will only work using their drives. Perhaps look through Crucial and OCZs pages to see if they have an offering? Otherwise maybe try one of the other utilities like Parted Magic?

RhoXS · 02-16-2011, 12:56 PM

Try EASEUS Disk Copy. Its a free download and is in the form of an iso. Burn the iso to a CD and boot from the CD. Makes perfect plug and play clones and is intuitive and easy to use.

Binky · 02-16-2011, 03:58 PM

You can always repair the alignment later if it gets screwed up.

razel · 02-16-2011, 04:02 PM

Looks like you have a WD and they offer Acronis for free. If you keep your WD HDD plugged in, especially in a SATA port. IIRC, last that I used it, you can use Acronis on your Crucial.

perdomot · 02-17-2011, 09:32 AM

Thanks for the info. Downloaded Easeus and will try it.

semo · 02-17-2011, 09:41 AM

There's a bunch of tools on UBCD that can do this. You can also try clonezilla but not the easiest to use

Diogenes2 · 02-17-2011, 10:44 AM

Just use the Win7 image backup utility ..

RhoXS · 02-17-2011, 10:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by perdomot

Thanks for the info. Downloaded Easeus and will try it.

I like EASEUS because it boots from a CD and requires nothing to be installed that will use up precious SSD space and load services that use up resources. It is simple, straight forward, and works like a charm. I tested it by cloning my 80 GB G2 SSD to a HDD. The HDD booted without issue when I plugged it in, albeit a lot more slowly. EASEUS reminds me of a refined Ghost 2003. I used Ghost 2003 for years and loved it because of its simplicity and reliability.

EASEUS is slow but that is a small price to pay for a free application that works so well.

One impoprtant bit of advice. Make sure the backup drive, the drive you are writing to, is a clearly different size than the drive you are backing up. This will make it much easier to clearly identify the souce drive and destination drive and reduce the chance of inadvertently selecting the wrong drive to back up and writing over your SSD, obviously a tragic error.

RaiderJ · 02-17-2011, 11:05 AM

I've personally always had great luck with Clonezilla. Not one non-user error the whole time I've used it.

Emulex · 02-17-2011, 09:19 PM

acronis that comes with an intel drive works with any intel system.

intel anything iirc. intel cpu and no intel drive = cool
amd cpu and no intel drive = no dice

also acronis easy clone is 30 day trial - which is what you want. just uninstall the registry entry and the trial and keep re-using.

hans007 · 02-17-2011, 10:25 PM

i tried EASEUS and it works, but eht problem is it does a sector by sector copy.

if your new SSD is a different size than the new one it will put the formatting data of your old SSD on the new one.

so for example i had a samsung 64gb ssd which is 59.6 gb free space.

i copied it to a sanforce 60GB which is like 55.9 gb free space.

so it had this weird situation where in windows it said the sandforce was 59.6gb so it had wrong formatting information.l

acronis readjusts that correctly , so i'd suggest trying a different app thatn EASEUS