Possible to clone boot drive without losing activation?

[kmmatney]

If it is some sort of OEM version, that would explain it. They must have their eye on you. BTW - any relation to Edward E. Matney, West Point, '51?

No - don't know an Edward Matney. I was born in California, but I think there is a big group of Matney's in Arkansas, from which my family moved to CA a while back. (I live in Denver, CO now).

 

[COPOHawk]

to OP:

I would strongly recommend Acronis True Image 2011 or 2012 as well. It just works...including with drives starting to fail (your mileage varies).

In the past I have used all version of Ghost (2003 through 15.0), Clonezilla and now Acronis, which works the best.

I still use Ghost 15.0 for daily backup and restore to the same drive...but Acronis wins for cloning.

 

[RhoXS]

Just thought I would add another comment or so.

I suspect I've had no activation issues because anytime I cloned a drive I used the cloned drive in the same machine in which the source drive was installed. Although I never tried it, I would bet there will be activation issues if the cloned drive is used in another machine because the hardware will have different MAC addresses.

Although others certainly disagree with me, in my opinion, software such as Acronis etc., that must be installed under Windows, will work but is still bloated obese crap that takes up too much unnecessary precious SSD space and requires unwanted resource hogging services to always start and stay active in the background. I much prefer the cloning software that boots off a USB memory device, CD, or floppy. Some of these programs, like the very good EaseUS DiskCopy, are excellent.

EaseUS DiskCopy has one downside as it is very slow.

 

[COPOHawk]

I don't anyone is suggesting that you install the software under Windows to make it work.

Whether it is Ghost, Acronis or Clonezilla...it all involved booting from a recovery CD to make the magic work. I like Acronis because of the GUI environment and the easy to use wizard (compare to command line like Clonezilla).

I have never had any luck using cloning software via Windows...but it has been a while since I tried.

 

[kmmatney]

So far, I've always used the free cloning software that comes with WD or Seagate drives. This is based on Acronis, and will close drives just fine within windows. You just need a WD or Seagate drive anywhere in your system to use the software (and can even be an external USB drive).