Legitimate W10 HD cloning SW

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JHZR2

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Helping my FIL who seems to have a failing hd on his Lenovo laptop. It runs W10.

We want to buy an SSD and clone the existing drive. I have very limited windows stuff - really just W7 on a dual boot MacBook Pro from 2008 or 2010.

On the various websites you encounter from google search, they're poorly written and seem to be only trying to push certain SW with questionable download links.

So what is legitimate?

Would like to boot on the HDD, clone from booted HDD, then swap out drives. Don't have a ton of other files so making a boot disk is questionable.
 
A lot of the Samsung SSD's have software that you can download on their website to perform this.

I have used EaseUS Todo backup with lots of success.
 
When I last looked into cloning to a SSD it was certainly possible to clone but the alignment wouldn't be correct.
A casual Google says:

One is to check it with System Information: press Windows + R key combo to start Run. Type "msinfo32" and hit Enter. Then go Components > Storage > Disks and look for your SSD and check the Partition Starting Offset. It needs to be divisible by 4096; otherwise the SSD block is not alignment correct.

So, if you clone, check the alignment afterwards.
If off, then you probably want to do a fresh install, which will get the alignment correct, or Google for a tool that can do the alignment.
It used to not be doable without repartitioning, but it looks like that has changed.
(FYI mine is 1,048,576 bytes. That evenly divides by 4096 to 256.)
 
If you do decide to partition, I'd recommend Paragon. They are not the only ones (often the hard drive maker does give some software, but that might only be for copying, not cloning). But I would absolutely have no problem going with them. I have not cloned a drive ever, but I've used them in the past without a hitch to copy files. In the past, they have had a 30 day free trial, which should be long enough to cover this one project you are on. Paragon has been in the partition software business for years, and while they are not the only ones, they have a good reputation whenever I've searched for reviews, or heard people discussing this.
 
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When I upgrade to an SSD a few years back, the included Samsung software cloned it perfectly. I just needed the cable to connect the SSD... about $12 on Amazon.
 
Acronis comes free with the Kingston SSD's if that helps. It works perfectly for what you are trying to accomplish.
 
Samsung SSD comes with Data Magician for free. If you can connect the SSD drive as a 2nd drive, or via eSata (external sata) , or some USB to Sata converter, then it will clone the full drive and be perfect.
Western Digital SSD also come with similar software. All of the packages provided by the SSD vendors work perfectly, and are quite easy to use. If you have a desktop with 2 spare SATA connectors, then you can remove the original laptop disk, connect both drives to the desktop, and do the migration there. They all work fine, and are silly easy to use.
 
I bought a couple 120Gb PNY drives for work and they supposedly come with cloning software. I haven't got them yet and am going to migrate an old XP installation on a PATA drive so we will se how it goes.
 
Originally Posted by spackard
When I last looked into cloning to a SSD it was certainly possible to clone but the alignment wouldn't be correct.
A casual Google says:

One is to check it with System Information: press Windows + R key combo to start Run. Type "msinfo32" and hit Enter. Then go Components > Storage > Disks and look for your SSD and check the Partition Starting Offset. It needs to be divisible by 4096; otherwise the SSD block is not alignment correct.

So, if you clone, check the alignment afterwards.
If off, then you probably want to do a fresh install, which will get the alignment correct, or Google for a tool that can do the alignment.
It used to not be doable without repartitioning, but it looks like that has changed.
(FYI mine is 1,048,576 bytes. That evenly divides by 4096 to 256.)

Good info thanks for posting. My numbers are the same as yours. I replaced an SSD with an SSD.

What I did was I went into Backup and Restore (Windows 7) and created an image. Put in the new SSD and put in the system repair disk and booted to it. I restored the computer from the HDD which had the image on it w/o using any cloning or aftermarket software. Event viewer is showing no problems and everything is working fine.
 
acronis works good, macrium reflect free is ok as long as your new drive is the same size or bigger.

many drives come with free acronis if you buy retail package.
it will do all the "alignment" and such.

If you have an external hdd you can boot from a cd or usb, backup to the external hdd, install the new ssd, restore from your external hdd backup.

other options include cloning directly to the new ssd using a usb>sata adapter.
 
I've been using Macrium Reflect free for a long time. I use it to back up my 3 drives on desktop, and three other PC's. All are backed up (using 'clone') to 'bare' HDD's, and some to SD and uSD cards, too.

It also images, and you CAN go from a larger, to a smaller capacity drive. I did it for my FIL. IIRC, it is NOT in the place expected, google will tell you how to do it.

I needed to let Windows format one of the SSD's, before the reimage would work. Not sure why.
 
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Acronis comes free with the Kingston SSD's if that helps. It works perfectly for what you are trying to accomplish.

I like their software... True Image.
 
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Originally Posted by StevieC
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Acronis comes free with the Kingston SSD's if that helps. It works perfectly for what you are trying to accomplish.

I like their software... True Image.


Yup, so do I, it's excellent
thumbsup2.gif
 
Both WD and Seagate offer Acronis for free.
Just find out what his current HDD brand is, then download from that website the Acronis software.
Then just use that for cloning the drive, then swap it in. I have done this multiple times and it is pain free and easy.

As mentioned, some SSD's also offer Acronis or some other software for free.

I have an old 40 gig WD HDD that I use all the time for cloning.
All it has on it is the WD Acronis software. Just plug it into a USB, plug the new SSD into another USB and clone away.
So long as the software sees any WD drive it will work, even if not cloning to or from the WD drive. Seagate works the same way.
 
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