Cloning: Acronis and Rescue media

[Charlie98]

I'm fixing to clone my 64GB SSD to my new 256GB SSD using Acronis Home '12. It's my understanding that it's best to clone drives outside of Windows... will creating an Acronis Rescue disk be able to accomplish this? ...or what do I need to do?

 

[LoveMachine]

I just changed my OS drive from a 64GB M4 to a 128GB Samsung 840. I used Acronis, in windows 7, and it worked without any issue. You set it up in the application, Acronis shuts down the system and reboots in its own stripped OS and clones the drives. Once it's done, it shuts down, you pull the old drive and/or change boot priority in BIOS, and you're off and running. I can't remember if the Acronis disc needs to be in an optical drive or not. Either way, it was pretty simple.

 

[postmortemIA]

beware that older versions of Acronis had problem with partition alignment that affects SSDs performance. Once you are done, verify with AS SSD benchmark or other tool what is partition's alignment.

 

[corkyg]

Yeah - you can do it within Windows, but it is much more reliable and has a much bettergui when using bootable Rescue Media. (It is done in a Linux variant.)

In Windows it still has to do it outside on a reboot, and you get a hokey command prompt interface. It sucks!

Use TI 12 or newer for best alignment. You will be doing a proportional cloning - different size drives. Do it all manually and you almost never will have a problem.

If the alignment is not right, it may not boot.

I have my Rescue Media on a thumb drive. It can also be on optical disk, but many new lappies don't have them.

 

[Diogenes2]

Macrium free will do it seamlessly running in windows, with no alignment problems.

Run the clone option. Disconnect the old drive, boot to the new one, and use Windows disk management to extend the partition to the full space available..

 

[Charlie98]

Well... I booted it from CD, it seemed to work very well. Problems with QuickBooks but I expected that. Everything else (but Steam) seems to work OK. I've already cloned the source disk back to the HTPC. That was easy. We will see...

 

[jiffylube1024]

beware that older versions of Acronis had problem with partition alignment that affects SSDs performance. Once you are done, verify with AS SSD benchmark or other tool what is partition's alignment.

It was fixed in 2011, so make sure you have acronis true image home 2011 or newer when restoring to an ssd.