New SSD cloning suggestions

[BobKnDP]

If you are like me you have a few spare USB HDD kicking around. Instead of direct cloning, you can take a drive image to any storage, and the restore that image to the new SSD. Then you don't need to buy anything.

That's a point.

Or, you could avoid external drives and image the old SSD to the internal HDD, if you have one, and it has sufficient free space.

It's good to have an image before replacing the OS drive regardless, just in case.

It would require having a bootable USB "rescue" drive from the imaging software.

One potential issue is the larger new SSD. A literal clone of the old one would give the same size partitions. My C: drive has a recovery partition after the primary one, which might make extending the primary partition tricky. Maybe good imaging software would permit resizing the primary partition to fill the available space. Macrium Reflect, used in clone mode, permitted that (1TB drive to a new 2TB one).

 

[tkbslc]

If you are like me you have a few spare USB HDD kicking around. Instead of direct cloning, you can take a drive image to any storage, and the restore that image to the new SSD. Then you don't need to buy anything.

I will check my desk drawers, thank you

You will need to use a utility that is bootable, since you will not be able to boot into your OS after you remove and replace the existing drive.

 

[skyglider]

If you are like me you have a few spare USB HDD kicking around. Instead of direct cloning, you can take a drive image to any storage, and the restore that image to the new SSD. Then you don't need to buy anything.

Really good suggestion!

The OP needs a backup of his current SSD anyway. Doing a backup and restore will confirm that the procedure works too.

To the OP, if you don't already have a spare 8GB (or larger) USB flash drive, you will need one to create a rescue flash drive (using your backup software) to do the restore. I recently bought 5 EASTFUN 8GB flash drives from Amazon ($11.99 for 5 today) and they work well so far. They have a LED light to show activity. Comes in handy to give stuff to others also.

Sky

 

[cutterpup]

If you are like me you have a few spare USB HDD kicking around. Instead of direct cloning, you can take a drive image to any storage, and the restore that image to the new SSD. Then you don't need to buy anything.

Really good suggestion!

The OP needs a backup of his current SSD anyway. Doing a backup and restore will confirm that the procedure works too.

To the OP, if you don't already have a spare 8GB (or larger) USB flash drive, you will need one to create a rescue flash drive (using your backup software) to do the restore. I recently bought 5 EASTFUN 8GB flash drives from Amazon ($11.99 for 5 today) and they work well so far. They have a LED light to show activity. Comes in handy to give stuff to others also.

Sky

Thank you for the advice.