"Foolproof" disc cloning software

britechguy

britechguy

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I know that nothing is entirely "foolproof," but some things come closer than others.

I just received a Silicon Power drive on to which I want to clone the OS drive which it will be replacing. They supply NTI Echo v5, but I cannot get it to work. It fails at the "creating partition table" stage for the target drive. I tried this with the target drive entirely uninitialized, initialized but with no volume created, and then after creating a volume using the Windows 11 Initialize Disc function that's now a part of Settings.

In the past, Macrium has been recommended, and I can and will use that if need be, but since the free version of Macrium is not long for this world, I though I'd ask what other options might be recommended.

I don't often have a need to clone discs, and for the most part whatever the drive manufacturer gives me to do that generally works, but there are always the contrary instances like this one.

I also know I have the option to take a full system image backup and then restore that image on to the new SSD, but I suspect there will be issues with that since the new SSD is 512 GB while the old HDD is 750 GB, though not even 100 GB is taken up as actually used space.
 
@YeOldeStonecat

FYI, the personal/free version of DriveImage does not support going from a larger drive to a smaller one. I'm going to size down the partition on the C: drive just for the fun of it to get this to work, but I thought it should be mentioned.

As a general feature of "foolproof" I am now including the ability to go from a larger drive to a smaller if the larger drive does not already exceed the capacity of the smaller drive, or vice versa. Very often when I'm doing drive upgrades it's going from a smaller drive to a larger one, but there are times, like this one, where I know that even a 512 GB SSD is going to be more than what the user will come close to using and am "downsizing" from an old HDD.
 
I have found that Macrium sometimes fails to clone. Paragon (not free) always works on drives that aren't faulty but it's very slow, can take 30 mins or more just to get to the copying stage. Because of this slowness I often use Macrium which is much faster, but occasionally I need to start again with Paragon.
 
britechguy said:
I also know I have the option to take a full system image backup and then restore that image on to the new SSD, but I suspect there will be issues with that since the new SSD is 512 GB while the old HDD is 750 GB, though not even 100 GB is taken up as actually used space.
Click to expand...
Macrium will let you resize from an image if you know how to do it.
 
HDClone by Miray has never failed me yet and is reasonably fast. The Pro Edition (85.34 Euros) is installed on my main PC so I can only use it on drives that are removed from the customer's PC. The Pro Edition Portable (167.23 Euros) is usable on cusromers' PCs but is too steep for me to justify buying. Since I need to remove the old drive in order to install the clone, there's no hardship going with just the non-portable edition.
 
britechguy said:
@YeOldeStonecat

FYI, the personal/free version of DriveImage does not support going from a larger drive to a smaller one. I'm going to size down the partition on the C: drive just for the fun of it to get this to work, but I thought it should be mentioned.
Click to expand...
Ahh...my bad. A few years ago I was always aware of that, as 99% of the computers we work with had 500 gig spindles, and we'd downsize to 256 SSDs. But these days with SSDs much lower in price we baseline at 512 SSDs now.

Most of our cloning....we use a hardware device now, but in the past we'd tried a lot of software solutions.
 
Reporting back, I've finally gotten things going with Miray HD Clone (which I had used, many moons ago, and thanks to @Larry Sabo for the reminder).

I did not try Clonezilla, but nothing else was working. I thought I might get away with using MiniTool Partition Wizard for the whole thing, but not the free version.

There are times, and this is one of them, where I really like a single-purpose, or very near to single-purpose, utility, and this is one of those. The Miray HDClone interface is about as simple as can be, and does precisely what it says it will.

It's really irritating that the utilities provided by (or at least licensed by) the actual drive maker (Silicon Power, in this case) don't work. I've done "transfer the system" type transfers with Samsung and Crucial SSDs and both have been a snap. Samsung Data Magician is their own thing, but Crucial used someone else's software under license, but I can't recall at the moment whose that was.
 
britechguy said:
I've done "transfer the system" type transfers with Samsung and Crucial SSDs and both have been a snap. Samsung Data Magician is their own thing, but Crucial used someone else's software under license, but I can't recall at the moment whose that was.
Click to expand...

Crucial ==> Acronis....same with free software you could download from Western Digital, Seagate, etc. All offered a free version of Acronis...tweaked so that it would only work if 1x of the drives connected to it was their brand.
 
Never buy anything else than samsung, and their cloning software is generally really good. I've used macrium and it typically takes 1000x longer than the smasung software and you can clone hot.

I use it as last resort when the samsung software fails ... which happens.
 
Time is not of the essence for me, in general, when it comes to cloning or system transfer.

I've bought Samsung once - great drives, but no better than the PNY, Crucial, Adata, and (now) Silicon Power drives I've used. None have failed after extended times in service (except Silicon Power, which I'm new to but has been recommended here).

I'm dealing with residential clients and break/fix. Ultra-high performance is not generally a need.
 
By the way, although Miray HDClone Free (and there are multiple levels of non-free) is slow in its cloning, it also can clone "hot."

Worked beautifully, and I kicked it off before I went to see a client today and it was done before I returned (even though it took 4 hours).
 
britechguy said:
By the way, although Miray HDClone Free (and there are multiple levels of non-free) is slow in its cloning, it also can clone "hot."

Worked beautifully, and I kicked it off before I went to see a client today and it was done before I returned (even though it took 4 hours).
Click to expand...
HDClone has always worked great for me. I found about it here in forums. It’s worth the cost.
 
I've used many of these utilities mentioned for cloning but, after trying them out, I have always reverted back to using Clonezilla, not because it's free, but because it has worked better than the paid for utilities, in my opinion. The only issue I've ever run into with it is going from a larger disk to a smaller one, which is when I use Microsoft's DISM utilities to capture and apply an image. Microsoft's way takes longer but it also works better than many of the other utilities I have tried.
 
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