Data Transfer

[Riptide0]

I recently got a 1tb SSD and have a 1tb HDD that I want to migrate data off of. The HDD has things like games, drivers, important files, installed programs, and a whole host of other things that would be very troublesome to transfer off of the drive manually. Is it possible to just transfer the data onto the SSD without starting over by installing everything manually? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Electronics Wizardy]

clone the drive with a cloning program like dd?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I recommend Macrium Reflect Free. I've had excellent luck cloning with it.

[Jimjamesjimothy8]

17 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

I recommend Macrium Reflect Free. I've had excellent luck cloning with it.

I've also used Macrium Reflect without issues.

[Xently]

AOMEI Backupper the free version has worked well for me in the past cloning drives and back-up success as well.  Now I own all of their Pro ver. software, but in your case i would just use the free to clone real quick.  Another AOMEI tool that's great, and I use almost daily, is AOMEI Partition Manager, just FYI.

 

I've also used Acronis TruImage in the past which also works really well, though i don't think they have a free version

[Riptide0]

7 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

I recommend Macrium Reflect Free. I've had excellent luck cloning with it.

When you create a cloned drive would I have to go in and reinstall all of my programs or would it be as simple as changing the drive letter and calling it a day? Considering I have everything on my HDD, and my os and nothing else on a seperate drive , would there even be any work to do or would it be a bit for bit copy?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

2 hours ago, Riptide0 said:

When you create a cloned drive would I have to go in and reinstall all of my programs or would it be as simple as changing the drive letter and calling it a day? Considering I have everything on my HDD, and my os and nothing else on a seperate drive , would there even be any work to do or would it be a bit for bit copy?

Macrium Reflect has two kinds of cloning. The default is called Intelligent Sector Cloning (or something like that) that will clone only sectors (or cells, in the case of SSDs) in use, whidh is what I recommend for most cloning. It's faster and will ignore sectors with any serious problems. The other kind of cloning (which I believe is called Forensic Cloning; I'm on my Linux machine right now so I can't check) will do bit by bit cloning. It's not needed for what you are doing so just use the default setting.

 

If the drive you are cloning to is the same size, just change the drive letter and call it a day. Functionally, the clone will be identical to the original drive. If the new drive is larger, you might have to increase the partition afterwards but that is easily done with a program called Minitool Partition Wizard.

[Riptide0]

19 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Macrium Reflect has two kinds of cloning. The default is called Intelligent Sector Cloning (or something like that) that will clone only sectors (or cells, in the case of SSDs) in use, whidh is what I recommend for most cloning. It's faster and will ignore sectors with any serious problems. The other kind of cloning (which I believe is called Forensic Cloning; I'm on my Linux machine right now so I can't check) will do bit by bit cloning. It's not needed for what you are doing so just use the default setting.

 

If the drive you are cloning to is the same size, just change the drive letter and call it a day. Functionally, the clone will be identical to the original drive. If the new drive is larger, you might have to increase the partition afterwards but that is easily done with a program called Minitool Partition Wizard.

I see. Thank you for the detailed explanation I get what you're talking about now. Bit by bit would be more troublesome and I thought that but since I have drivers on said drive I didn't know if I had to use any particular programs to clone said drive.