Clone HD with a Restore Partition

[olds]

I am probably buying a pre-built PC that will have a partition from the factory for a re-install. No disk comes with the OS.
I want to swap out their non-SSD hdd for a SSD that I already own.
Can I clone their image to my SSD and be able to recover/re-install the OS if needed?

 

[JackMDS]

I just did it this morning.

I Backup the original Drive as a whole to an External Drive using Acronis True image 2012 (TI) Boot Disk.

Than I put the SSD in, Boot again with TI, and Recover from the backup file to the SSD.

General size would not matter as long as the Total of the actual Data on all partitions on the original Disk are smaller than the SSD's size.

In my case I backed up from a 500 GB SATA HD that had 80GB of total Data in all partitions to a 120GB SSD.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832200036


😎

 

[olds]

Thank you, Jack.

 

[Charlie98]

General size would not matter as long as the Total of the actual Data on all partitions on the original Disk are smaller than the SSD's size.

In my case I backed up from a 500 GB SATA HD that had 80GB of total Data in all partitions to a 120GB SSD.
😎

So you are able to image to a smaller drive just based on the amount of data? You didn't have to partition down the old drive to the size of the new one?

 

[corkyg]

Just as Jack said. I have done it twice, cloning from 320GB to 256GB. I used TI's proportional mode and it was done perfectly. I did not adjust the size of the partitions - TI did that for me as part of the cloning process. Took about 10 minutes - no biggie.