How to Clone Windows to New Hard Drive?

[holygamer]

I have Macrium Reflect and I've got a backup image of my 120GB SSD C drive. I would like to copy my hard drive to a new 128GB SSD PCIe hard drive and have Windows run without problems. All components on my PC are the same, it's just the hard drive that's new. Can anyone suggest software that will 100% copy the drive without problems?

I previously used Macrium Reflect to do that when I had a new PC with all new components and it worked - Windows booted however there were lots of glitches in Windows after that so I'm not sure I want to use Macrium again for cloning the drive. Any suggestions?

[GuidoLS]

I've used 4 tools over the years.

The first was Norton Ghost, which is no longer in production, and has been superseded by Symantec System Recovery. They do have Ghost in the enterprise version, but that's probably more money than you care to spend.
The next was Acronis True Image. It's available, but it comes at a cost (subscription) although they're now offering a 30 day trial. I'm not a fan of large scale anything when it involves the 'cloud'.
I currently use CloneZilla, which is a free solution. It's not as powerful, feature wise, as Acronis and Ghost, but it does at least one thing very well - it clones drives. There are some minor caveats, but you don't seem to be describing any of them (destination must be the same size or larger as the original, no cloud backup, etc).

Personally, I'd just do a clean install - it's a lot less legwork up front, and there's a lot less opportunity for error.

(The 4th option is ntfsclone, which is part of NTFS tools, but you aren't running a *nix system.)

[holygamer]

Thanks. CloneZilla sounds good. I changed my mind, I'm going to get a 500GB SSD and split it into 3 partitions. One of the partitions will be for my C drive contents - I will create the partitions before using CloneZilla. Can I still use CloneZilla to clone my C drive which is currently a whole drive into 1 of those partitions on the new drive?

[PaulM1]

Can anyone suggest software that will 100% copy the drive without problems?

Buy a Samsung SSD comes with Samsung's own installation software, worked a treat for me

[MTyson93]

Hi holygamer,
Im not an expert on clonezilla but you should be able to clone to any partition so long as its big enough
When i cloned my drive i used Easus todo Backup which had a clone option, think theyve since added a clone to ssd which would have helped as i had a lot of settings to change to get it working optimally in windows!