Free cloning software for SSD?

[perdomot]

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]

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]

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]

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

 

[razel]

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]

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

 

[semo]

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

 

[Diogenes2]

Just use the Win7 image backup utility ..

 

[RhoXS]

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]

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

 

[Emulex]

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]

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

 

[realneil]

Will EASEUS work properly cloning my 256GB SSD over to a 480GB SSD?

 

[corkyg]

Don't know if EASEUS does proportional cloning - Acronis does. That's why I always use it from a bootable media, CD or Thumb Drive.

 

[npaladin-2000]

I prefer PartEd Magic myself. Easier to use than CloneZilla, basically you can copy-paste the partitions from the old drive to the new drive (connect one via USB) and resize them however you want. Just remember to set the boot partition as active.

Useful tool to have in general, good for rescuing files from systems that won't boot too. I always keep a copy handy.

 

[realneil]

I ended up using Acronis for the clone.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I looked through all the posts, and all of these luminaries skipped mention of Macrium Reflect.

It won't do proportional resizing during a clone -- you have to image the resulting drive and then restore it, in the process selecting the size of the result.

But it will clone dual-boot OS setup on a single disk, and give a perfect, error-free, functioning result

 

[otinane]

If you were using linux a simple command on your bash will do the job

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M

 

[deustroop]

Will EASEUS work properly cloning my 256GB SSD over to a 480GB SSD?

I looked through all the posts, and all of these luminaries skipped mention of Macrium Reflect.

It won't do proportional resizing during a clone -- you have to image the resulting drive and then restore it, in the process selecting the size of the result.

But it will clone dual-boot OS setup on a single disk, and give a perfect, error-free, functioning result

Cloning with Macrium, from a smaller to a larger drive, involves a simple manual operation.The default clone is to copy all source partitions and sizes. Macrium provides a proposed layout for the target drive. Thus when the target is larger, the schema will show the NTFS partition with unallocated space . One just expands the divider to include all the available space and then clone away.
Macrium by default will copy only the sectors with data.When the target drive is smaller, there is no unallocated space and the data itself is copied. I haven't looked into what happens when the data is larger than the available NTFS partition.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Cloning with Macrium, from a smaller to a larger drive, involves a simple manual operation.The default clone is to copy all source partitions and sizes. Macrium provides a proposed layout for the target drive. Thus when the target is larger, the schema will show the NTFS partition with unallocated space . One just expands the divider to include all the available space and then clone away.
Macrium by default will copy only the sectors with data.When the target drive is smaller, there is no unallocated space and the data itself is copied. I haven't looked into what happens when the data is larger than the available NTFS partition.

I'll take another look at Macrium for what you describe. In my case, I had dual-boot with sys-reserved, EFI, Win7Boot and Win10boot partitions. And I think I tried to do what you described, and ran into problems. Of course, it might be easier or less uncertain to work with a single-OS system. I know that Acronis -- for chipsets and drives known to work with whichever version of Disk Director or True Image -- allowed proportional resizing that was fairly robust in the way the user could control it.

Oddly, when I was doing advance research for how Macrium could do it on the web, I ran into forum posts that indicated it would only copy the partitions in the size of the sources, and someone explained the resizing that could be done after imaging the drive with Macrium.

Has anyone tried Mini Tool ? Indications I found -- forums, testaments, etc. -- suggest a fairly robust utility as good as the best. I'd be interested if someone has firsthand experience. Otherwise, it's not a major outlay of an entrance fee to try it. Maybe there's even a trial version, and I'll look at that link more closely.

 

[Elixer]

I looked through all the posts, and all of these luminaries skipped mention of Macrium Reflect.

It won't do proportional resizing during a clone -- you have to image the resulting drive and then restore it, in the process selecting the size of the result.

But it will clone dual-boot OS setup on a single disk, and give a perfect, error-free, functioning result

Erm, no, not a perfect, error-free clone.
https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...ng-in-macrium-v7.2499898/page-2#post-38771594

So, that left a big sour taste in my mouth.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Erm, no, not a perfect, error-free clone.
https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...ng-in-macrium-v7.2499898/page-2#post-38771594

So, that left a big sour taste in my mouth.

I never had an experience like that with any of the products.

this time around, I think I tried cloning the dual-boot system-disk with EaseUS, and it wouldn't boot into Win 10. I started poking around to see what was new for disk utilities -- I had used many, but I'd depended on Acronis DD and TI in recent years. Customer-support techs at EasUS and Acronis backed away from any guarantee that their software could do what I wanted. I finally stumbled upon Macrium's ability to do it in some recent forum post "somewhere," and checked their compendious instruction/guide.

I wasn't even sure it would work just before I initiated the clone, but at least it was the Free version.

I just finished using it again on my laptop -- also a dual-boot configuration. I had been hesitant about cloning through a USB2-connected docking station, although that's what I did after acquiring the laptop two years ago ( -- and it's an oldie -- a T8300 Centrino C2D). But no problems again.

At this point, I must say how amazed at how stupid I was, thinking that an SSD would "save power" over a 2.5" laptop spinner. Read the fine print! [ . . . Dummy -- that's what I call myself]. SSDs draw 1.7A, and a 2.5" HDD spinner draws 0.85A.

 

[dlerious]

Has anyone tried Mini Tool ? Indications I found -- forums, testaments, etc. -- suggest a fairly robust utility as good as the best. I'd be interested if someone has firsthand experience. Otherwise, it's not a major outlay of an entrance fee to try it. Maybe there's even a trial version, and I'll look at that link more closely.

I have Mini-Tool Partition Wizard. I've used it to align SSD partitions. I haven't tried cloning with it yet.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I have Mini-Tool Partition Wizard. I've used it to align SSD partitions. I haven't tried cloning with it yet.

All such intelligence forthcoming has cumulative value to those of us with a software budget.

 

[dlerious]

All such intelligence forthcoming has cumulative value to those of us with a software budget.

Let me see what I can figure out. I'll have to find a spare drive and do a few other things.