Cloning a Windows 10 drive

[Marbury]

When I had my pc built 2 and a half years ago with windows 10, I chose a 500gb sd drive for the main C system drive. Unfortunately it only has a few gb left so I have purchased a 1TB sd to replace it. My question is, can I just make a straight clone of this with Marconi Reflect and swap it over ?

Thanks

[Wonks]

Yes, as long as the new drive is the same size or bigger than the original.

SSDs take a real performance hit with 10% or less free space, so you should see a big improvement in responsiveness. But try not to let the new drive get so full. Can you keep the original as an extra drive for storage, and reformat it after a successful cloning?

[OneWorld]

When I had my pc built 2 and a half years ago with windows 10, I chose a 500gb sd drive for the main C system drive. Unfortunately it only has a few gb left so I have purchased a 1TB sd to replace it. My question is, can I just make a straight clone of this with Marconi Reflect and swap it over ?

Thanks

Yes you can clone the drive, but I would make a drive image as well, as backup. I use Reflect a lot and thus far, has only let me down once, luckily I had enough images to get me back to fully working again. It is prudent to keep a drive image anyway

Cloning v Imaging
https://blog.macrium.com/techie-tuesday ... be74abb089

[Nazard]

Ideally, keep a copy of the drive image on a separate disk, which is not plugged in, or connected, to your PC at the time you do your cloning to the new SSD.

If the new SSD is a Samsung, their 'Magician' software works well - it's their propietary cloning tool.

[Marbury]

Ok, thanks. Its a Sandisk ultra 3D ssd

I have made a clone of the current drive on a mechanical drive that is disconnected. I always thought an image the same thing. When my new 1TB drive ends up exceeding the 500gb capacity of my current, it would be then impossible to use the soon to be old 500gb for making a clone or image.

[Marbury]

Bit of a problem. I have successfully cloned the drive but the cloned drive (1TB) is showing exactly the same data that is free as the source disk (500gb) Both drives are showing 464gb used with 72.6gb free. What has happened to the extra 500gb ?

Also, I need to tell the PC to boot from the new drive.

[Jimmy B]

Your new drive now contains an exact copy of the 512GB partition on the old drive, and a lot of free space. (It may also contain a recovery partition, if the old disk had one).
You can either expand the 512GB partition to fill the entire disk, or create extra partitions to fill the space, or a combination of the two.
In any case, you need a partition editor.
I have used Easus Partition Master in the past. I believe that it was free for personal use. There are a number of other options, and your new disk may include one.
https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager/epm-free.html

Do this before you make the new disk the boot disk (which Partition Master should also be able to help you with, if I recall correctly).

[Marbury]

Thanks, I have downloaded and installed the software but when I try to merge the unallocated space with the main storage area it tells me I can't do that unless I pay money. I would have thought this was a task that could be done in Windows disc manager ?

[Jimmy B]

The free version that I have (from several years ago) can resize partitions. I'm not about to upgrade it in case that capability disappears. But according to the website you can still do this with the free version.
I assume that you are not booting from the new drive? If so, you may want to boot from your old drive and try again.
In answer to your question: Yes, Windows disk manager looks as if it can do the same thing. Did you try it?

[sonics]

Probably the best partition software for personal use is the Paragon offering, IMO.
Also check out O&O Software for very affordable (always on sale somewhere for $10!) disk software.

[Marbury]

No I wasn't booting from the new drive. Perhaps if I wipe the drive and start again with AOMEI it will give me this option before the clone ?

[Jimmy B]

You shouldn't need to do that. Didn't you say that Windows Disk Management was offering you the option to extend the volume? If so, I would take it.
Or if Partition Manager really won't do this any more, why not try Paragon as suggested by Sonics?
TBH, I would expect any of these methods to work.

[Marbury]

You can use Disk Management to add space to an existing volume, extending it into empty space on the drive, but only if the empty space doesn't have a volume on it (it's unallocated) and comes immediately after the volume you want to extend, with no other volumes in-between.

Unfortunately there is 517mb of "healthy recovery partition" in between. So that's out the window.

[Jimmy B]

OK, that makes sense. I suspected that there might be a recovery partition in the way. I'm not aware of any risk-free way to move it using Microsoft tools, so you need a more powerful set of tools. If, as you say, Easus Partition Master is still demanding money, then it makes sense to try something else, such as the Paragon software that Sonics suggested.
Alternatively, since you used Macrium Reflect 7 to clone the disk (I think?), you could do as you suggest and wipe the new disk and start again, but this time following these instructions on their website to change the partition sizes as a part of the clone process:
https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/displ ... ing+a+disk

As usual there a several ways to solve this, and all of them should work.

[OneWorld]

OK, that makes sense. I suspected that there might be a recovery partition in the way. I'm not aware of any risk-free way to move it using Microsoft tools, so you need a more powerful set of tools. If, as you say, Easus Partition Master is still demanding money, then it makes sense to try something else, such as the Paragon software that Sonics suggested.
Alternatively, since you used Macrium Reflect 7 to clone the disk (I think?), you could do as you suggest and wipe the new disk and start again, but this time following these instructions on their website to change the partition sizes as a part of the clone process:
https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/displ ... ing+a+disk

As usual there a several ways to solve this, and all of them should work.

AOMEI Partition Assistant, MiniTool Partition Tool, Macrium all offer free versions of software that allow partition resizing, the Macrium alternative offering partition resizing when restoring an image, the other two alternatives are more than adequate, I've been using them for ages, no problems

There's a catch though - the user has to READ the download options and the same regarding the instructions for use

[Marbury]

OK, that makes sense. I suspected that there might be a recovery partition in the way. I'm not aware of any risk-free way to move it using Microsoft tools, so you need a more powerful set of tools. If, as you say, Easus Partition Master is still demanding money, then it makes sense to try something else, such as the Paragon software that Sonics suggested.
Alternatively, since you used Macrium Reflect 7 to clone the disk (I think?), you could do as you suggest and wipe the new disk and start again, but this time following these instructions on their website to change the partition sizes as a part of the clone process:
https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/displ ... ing+a+disk

As usual there a several ways to solve this, and all of them should work.

I have managed to wipe the drive and start again with Reflect and it has worked. I then joined the 2 sectors with Partition Master. So far so good, but now the next task is getting the pc to boot from the new drive.

[Jimmy B]

I'm surprised that you needed to merge 2 partitions. It should have been possible to set up Macrium Reflect so that it created the correct partition sizes when it cloned the drive. Hopefully you didn't merge the C drive with the recovery partition?
Assuming that all is good there, this link tells you how to set the system to boot from the new drive:
https://www.easeus.com/partition-master ... html#part1
(about a third of the way down the page)

[Marbury]

Thanks, that worked a treat. I will say however that the extra drive space hasn't made much of a difference to the speed of the pc.

Thank you all for your help with this. Much appreciated.

[Jimmy B]

You are welcome. It's good to hear that it's working.

[Marbury]

Now what to do with the old drive. Perhaps use to make a disc image ?

[Jimmy B]

Since no-one else has answered this...
Your old SSD already contains a copy of your current system. I would keep it as it is for 2-3 weeks in case the new drive fails. It is extremely unlikely to fail, but if it does so, it will probably be in the first few days or weeks. (It will eventually wear out after a very large number of read/write operations, but I wouldn't worry about that now).
After that, having checked that the Recovery Partition is intact on the new drive, and possibly creating a Recovery Drive on a USB stick, the old SSD is "spare". You can install it as an extra drive on your PC, either internally if you have space or in a USB caddy. This is extremely useful for many different purposes including backing up your data. For more ideas of what those purposes may be, I suggest you search the internet for "how to use the D Drive".

[Marbury]

Thanks. Unfortunately I have had the pc freeze twice in the last few days with this blue screen message

"Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart".

It then goes into a re-boot so at least not a crash that nothing can be done with. Should I be worried as this never happened with the old drive ?

[Jimmy B]

Yes you should be worried. A system that randomly crashes is of no use to anyone.

I would go back to the old drive and make sure that the problem goes away. Then swap to the new drive and see if it comes back again. That way you can be sure of the source of the problem.

[Marbury]

I am hoping its hardware related asmy aging Komplete K6 AI has a terrible usb port that has become so flaky. That was flashing when the crash happened indicating it was offline. I have since added more software to the new drive too that I am working on so its not very practical to go back to the older drive. Perhaps running CC cleaner or something similar might find the problem ? Really hate this kind of thing.