Question best free (ideally portable) disk cloning software?

[Homerboy]

Need to clone a bunch of HDDs at work. Looking for the best/lightest footprint piece of software. Free of course
Thanks!

 

[corkyg]

For "free" you'll probably get a consensus for Macrium Reflect.

 

[TheELF]

Make a windows recovery disk/usb and make sure imagex and/or dism is included, that's what microsoft uses to "clone" apply windows installations.
I doubt you will find any decent cloning tool that is free for professional use.

 

[Homerboy]

I ended up using EaseUS free partition software as the destination drive was smaller than the source (240Gb vs 250Gb)
it seemed to have worked, but now when I boot into Windows I'm getting a piled of errors about C" being corrupt and having to run checkdsk on it (run now). Still loads windows though. So not sure what's going on. This is an older (~7 years) dell desktop I'm testing with

 

[VirtualLarry]

I doubt you will find any decent cloning tool that is free for professional use.

There are some that are free for home/non-commercial usage, but it would be a license violation for usage with a commercial establishment such as a corporation. (Don't forget, many of them "tag" cloned installs, so they can forensically-examine which cloning software was used to make the clone, and the serial number/product key/hash. At least, I know for a fact that Norton Ghost for DOS did that.)

 

[Homerboy]

There are some that are free for home/non-commercial usage, but it would be a license violation for usage with a commercial establishment such as a corporation. (Don't forget, many of them "tag" cloned installs, so they can forensically-examine which cloning software was used to make the clone, and the serial number/product key/hash. At least, I know for a fact that Norton Ghost for DOS did that.)

That's an interesting note. In the end I just did a clean install due to some other issues that popped up along the way. Not a big deal
Thanks!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just an N.B. ... there's always a bootable Linux USB, and using the "dd" command. That's free software, that's free to use under any condition, assuming that you "accept" the GPL.