Solved! Best free way to clone my Windows installation from one drive to another?

[SteveGrabowski]

I have a 1TB NVME SSD coming in today and am wondering what's the best free way to clone everything from my ancient 250GB SATA SSD from 2015 so I can use my NVME SSD as the boot drive.

 

[Tech Junky]

I use clonezilla and then to resize the partition just boot into Linux and use gparted.

 

[lopri]

I second clonezilla. I used it successfully a few times in the past.

 

[In2Photos]

Macrium Reflect has been my tool of choice.

 

[TheELF]

I have a 1TB NVME SSD coming in today and am wondering what's the best free way to clone everything from my ancient 250GB SATA SSD from 2015 so I can use my NVME SSD as the boot drive.

No can do, that 250Gb ssd has an OS made for very different hardware which will cause issues and also you would lose your license, which you might be able to restore with a phone call to MS.
If you still want to try look at google for "clone to dissimilar" plenty cloning tools have this feature and it takes care of any driver issues at least.

 

[Tech Junky]

you would lose your license

Never had an issue with this sort of thing.

OP is simply switching the drive not the system which shouldn't produce any issue with license keys. Even if it was a full system migration it still shouldn't be an issue. I've cloned my setup from laptop to a TB4 enclosure and was able to boot my server from the disk w/o any prompts for licensing.

 

[In2Photos]

No can do, that 250Gb ssd has an OS made for very different hardware which will cause issues and also you would lose your license, which you might be able to restore with a phone call to MS.
If you still want to try look at google for "clone to dissimilar" plenty cloning tools have this feature and it takes care of any driver issues at least.

I've done this sort thing at least a half-dozen times, upgrading laptop HDD to SSD. Windows licenses are typically tied to the motherboard, not the drive. This should work 100% for the OP.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Thanks everyone. Macrium Reflect turned out to be exactly what I needed.

 

[Glaurung]

Clonezilla can't handle cloning from a large disk (say a HDD) to a smaller disk (like an SSD). It's a nightmare when cloning the multiple partitions that make up a bootable system these days from a spinning disk to an SSD. And you have to use it from a bootable thumb drive, which is an extra step.

Other software, like Macrium Reflect, puts basic system cloning behind a paywall. I looked long and hard for something that would let me clone a live system disk from a big, mostly empty drive to a smaller drive without choking.
And then I discovered Disk Genius. It's marketed as a data recovery tool, but it offers a full set of partition management and disk cloning features as well, and those features work perfectly in the free version of the software.

 

[TheELF]

Clonezilla can't handle cloning from a large disk (say a HDD) to a smaller disk (like an SSD). It's a nightmare when cloning the multiple partitions that make up a bootable system these days from a spinning disk to an SSD. And you have to use it from a bootable thumb drive, which is an extra step.

Other software, like Macrium Reflect, puts basic system cloning behind a paywall. I looked long and hard for something that would let me clone a live system disk from a big, mostly empty drive to a smaller drive without choking.
And then I discovered Disk Genius. It's marketed as a data recovery tool, but it offers a full set of partition management and disk cloning features as well, and those features work perfectly in the free version of the software.

That's mainly an issue because people search for specialized cloning software while (mostly) any random partition manager has the capability to clone partitions and almost always has an menu item for cloning the whole disk(system) as well so you don't have to manually create and copy several partitions.
Minitools aomei aeseus all have the capability to clone partitions in their free versions.

 

[Shlong]

When I went to AM4, what I did was make sure to login my Microsoft account on Windows. Open up Macrium Reflect and clone my 256gb ssd (Windows 10 install) to a new 512gb ssd. I extended the partition using MiniTool Partition Wizard free edition. Now I have AM5 on the way (7950X with ASRock X670E Steel Legend) and also a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro. Now I will repeat that same process after upgrading to Windows 11. If you're logged in the main Microsoft account, you can keep your license.

 

[igor_kavinski]

If you're logged in the main Microsoft account, you can keep your license.

Do let us know if it works on your AM5 build too.

 

[blckgrffn]

Thanks everyone. Macrium Reflect turned out to be exactly what I needed.

I’ve used it tens of times in these situations, has to be closing in on a hundred and it has worked every time. Back in the day I had to be sure the partition on the source disk (like a 2TB hd with 200 GB used) was resized to smaller than the target SSD (like a 500 GB one) but now I think that is handled.

Disk management can grow and shrink partitions, so no third parties needed for that.

Changing motherboards has even become pretty trivial when necessary, just a key away from it activating again. When just changing the drive, zero issues. The last one I did was a 9600K/390 to 12600K/690 and that went without a hitch. The wifi on the new board being bum (well documented on the Internet when you have the error code and driver to Google) took me longer to overcome than anything else.

Another dissimilar change before that was my moms old PC - 3770K/z77 to 4600G/B450 and again just a key re-enter with W10.

 

[Shlong]

Do let us know if it works on your AM5 build too.

Will do, just in case though I saved my License key serial using a program called ShowKeyPlus.

 

[Shlong]

Do let us know if it works on your AM5 build too.

Loaded up the new cloned Samsung 980 pro and Windows was active on first boot.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Looks like this Macrium software is ending support. Is it still worth a purchase? Or is there something better? Free?

Thanks

 

[In2Photos]

Looks like this Macrium software is ending support. Is it still worth a purchase? Or is there something better? Free?

Thanks

Where are you seeing that? https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

It was some top 20 imaging software review site ...

 

[manly]

Where are you seeing that? https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

They announced a few months ago that version 8 is the last free one, and it will be supported (updates) for about a year.

I cloned from a 512GB SSD to 2TB SSD a few weeks ago, and I used Reflect Free. However I was being OCD, and manually created all the partitions in Linux. This allowed me to have precise control over the boundaries, even though modern tools properly align to 4k pages for SSDs.

In the process, I did discover a couple quirks with Reflect: it will not grow a Linux ext4 filesystem. Also, Dell has some recovery partitions and Reflect won't extend those either.

Finally IIRC CloneZilla can clone to a smaller disk, but you have to enable some experimental flag for it to shrink NTFS filesystems. CloneZilla is great, but I'd be a little nervous about that.