Free tool for HDD upgrade?

[CZroe]

I'm tired of not having enough space so I'm upgrading a 320GB WD Black drive in my Alienware M11x to a 1TB Hiitachi drive. All of my commercial drive imaging software is WAY out of date and the other stuff included with my SSDs is usually locked to drives from the SSD manufacturer. I want to preserve the original partition structure with recovery partition and bootloader though I do want to expand the capacity of both (during my brief stint with a smaller SSD on this notebook I did the opposite: Shrunk both partitions and elimiated most of the free space on the recovery partition.

So, what are we using today that can accomplish this for free? I recall having some issue with Macrium Reflect last time it was suggested, like it didn't support resizing or something.

 

[ArisVer]

I think you can use a WD free version of Acronis to clone the disk since Hitachi is owned by WD now (correct me if I am wrong). Expanding the partitions should be done afterwards and your recovery partition is in the middle, so you might want to leave that as it is. Otherwise you have to move your OS to the right to make room for the recovery partition to expand.

 

[Essence_of_War]

'dd' with any live linux distribution will handle this.

If you don't like that, Terabyte's Image for Linux or Image for Windows will let you image the drive to an external, and then you can restore the image to the new drive.