What's a good, free Hard Drive cloning program?

[dogmush]

I have an olde Lenovo Yoga laptop that I use for troubleshooting and monitoring my 3D printers, and some other small stuff around the house.  It has gotten painfully slow recently so I'd like to give it a little help.  RAM is soldered to the MB so the 4Gb I got is all I'm going to have, but I figured if I swapped out the 10 year old spinny platter drive with an SSD she might run a little faster.

I've already sourced the adapter I need to put an M.2 SSD in it, and I can get a Tb WD Black for $75 or so, but the catch is there's some stuff on the drive I like and use, and I'd like to not start from scratch.  So my thought is get the new drive, put it in a USB adapter and plug it in to the computer, clone the existing drive, swap hardware, and Bob's your uncle.

First of all, will that work?  Or will I make my new shiny drive think it's 256 mb or something?  Second, if it will work, what's the cheapest bit of software to do the clone with?

Thanks.

[WLJ]

I've been using Lazesoft Disk Image & Clone
Probably not the greatest but it's free for home users

It's halfway down the page
https://www.lazesoft.com/download.html

[cordex]

A true clone will replicate the size of the original drive, but you can adjust partition sizes after the fact.  Clonedisk is one free option, but it doesn’t have a pretty GUI.

Another option is a hardware clone tool that lets you plug two SATA drives into it and it will clone one to the other. Same deal on partition adjustment after the fact. But if you are only doing this once or twice the $30 might be better spent elsewhere.

Some of the paid drive clone tools will resize partitions as you go.

[lee n. field]

I have an olde Lenovo Yoga laptop that I use for troubleshooting and monitoring my 3D printers, and some other small stuff around the house.  It has gotten painfully slow recently so I'd like to give it a little help.  RAM is soldered to the MB so the 4Gb I got is all I'm going to have, but I figured if I swapped out the 10 year old spinny platter drive with an SSD she might run a little faster.

I've already sourced the adapter I need to put an M.2 SSD in it, and I can get a Tb WD Black for $75 or so, but the catch is there's some stuff on the drive I like and use, and I'd like to not start from scratch.  So my thought is get the new drive, put it in a USB adapter and plug it in to the computer, clone the existing drive, swap hardware, and Bob's your uncle.

First of all, will that work?  Or will I make my new shiny drive think it's 256 mb or something?  Second, if it will work, what's the cheapest bit of software to do the clone with?

Thanks.

If you're cloning to a Western Digital SSD, get Acronis True Image for Western Digital.  Free download from WD.  That will resize automatically during the clone process.

Clonezilla has a live boot disk that can be downloaded.  Won't resize (unless they've changed it since the last time I messed with it), but you can resize with gparted, or within Windows itself.

Otherwise, any old Linux live CD, but you need to know what you're doing. 

[dogmush]

^^^

Sounds perfect.  I'll try that. Thanks

[Hawkmoon]

Based on HeroHog's recommendation, I've used Macrium Reflect. But it doesn't resize, so when I upgraded a laptop from a 750 GB hard drive to a 1 TB SSD, I had a bunch of unallocated space. I couldn't expand the C: drive logical partition due to a recovery partition that followed it, so I took the coward's way out and just used the unallocated space to create a D: drive.

[Nick1911]

I use dd, but I'll be the first to note that while powerful, you really have to have a good working knowledge of filesystems to use it.  Not beginner friendly.

Since my preferred distro uses LVMs by default, I mostly add space and copy disks inside that structure.

Twenty years ago, we used Norton Ghost for windows systems.

[RocketMan]

If you choose to buy a Samsung EVO SSD, they provide free cloning software that works well and will resize partitions if desired.  The Samsung drives are well thought of.  I have some in use around here.

[Ben]

If you choose to buy a Samsung EVO SSD, they provide free cloning software that works well and will resize partitions if desired.  The Samsung drives are well thought of.  I have some in use around here.

I think the Samsung migration software only works with Samsung, but that's what I use as well as I have all Samsung drives. I used it several times to clone new drives, and I actually use it as a backup as well. I keep a spare SSD in an enclosure, and besides Windows backup (the old Win7 local backup, not the cloud backup), once every couple of months I hook up the external SSD and just clone is as a backup. The clone actually finishes faster than Windows backup does.

[HeroHog]

Macrium Reflect. If you know your way around the MS Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management, you CAN resize a drive. It may take a few steps, but it CAN be done. I replaced my 256GB SSD with a 1TB one. Restored C: as the 256GB, resized to 290GB and then made a 640GB D:.
I could have allocated ALL the remaining space to C: had I wanted to. Currently I have 100GB free on C: and 631GB free on D: and I have a LOT of apps on C:! MOST actual data lives on my 4TB (2 4TB drives Mirrored) SAN/NAS drive with PLENTY of room to spare.

[RocketMan]

The Spotted Cow computer company is still a thing.  I thought they went to the business slaughterhouse years ago.

[WLJ]

The Spotted Cow computer company is still a thing.  I thought they went to the business slaughterhouse years ago.

Gateway? Was bought up by Acer back in 2007. They killed the brand for a while but recently brought it back.

[RocketMan]

Gateway? Was bought up by Acer back in 2007. They killed the brand for a while but recently brought it back.

That explains it.  Thanks.

[lee n. field]

I have an olde Lenovo Yoga laptop that I use for troubleshooting and monitoring my 3D printers, and some other small stuff around the house.  It has gotten painfully slow recently so I'd like to give it a little help.  RAM is soldered to the MB so the 4Gb I got is all I'm going to have, but I figured if I swapped out the 10 year old spinny platter drive with an SSD she might run a little faster.

I've already sourced the adapter I need to put an M.2 SSD in it, and I can get a Tb WD Black for $75 or so, but the catch is there's some stuff on the drive I like and use, and I'd like to not start from scratch.  So my thought is get the new drive, put it in a USB adapter and plug it in to the computer, clone the existing drive, swap hardware, and Bob's your uncle.

First of all, will that work?  Or will I make my new shiny drive think it's 256 mb or something?  Second, if it will work, what's the cheapest bit of software to do the clone with?

Thanks.

(since I just wrestled through it for something), you might need to read this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/disk-management/change-an-mbr-disk-into-a-gpt-disk .

[RocketMan]

SSD on my main laptop started failing a few days ago.  Just replaced it with a 1tb Samsung EVO 870 that was on sale at Best Buy for $95.  Used their free Samsung Magician software to clone the failing drive over to the new SSD.  It was the second time i've used that software, and again it was a painless exercise.