Cloning the SSD

[Sport Driver]

Ok thing is I want to change SSD in my laptop with bigger one. I would like to clone it. I know it would be better to do clean install but thing is I want to use my old SSD to replace hdd in mom's laptop and she still has win7 on it. So I would like to try  cloning  on my laptop so I know how things work. because she really doesn't want to lose anything. So any reccomendations of free cloning software that you had good experiance with?

 

[Senzelian]

Aomei Backupper (worst name ever) is by far my favorite, even tho it has gotten really obnoxious with their dumb ads over the last couple of years.

It even supports a sector by sector clone, which I always recommend doing when transferring an entire OS.

 

https://www.ubackup.com/help/disk-clone.html

https://www.ubackup.com/clone/sector-by-sector-clone-or-not-8523.html

[Sport Driver]

16 hours ago, Senzelian said:

Aomei Backupper (worst name ever) is by far my favorite, even tho it has gotten really obnoxious with their dumb ads over the last couple of years.

It even supports a sector by sector clone, which I always recommend doing when transferring an entire OS.

 

https://www.ubackup.com/help/disk-clone.html

https://www.ubackup.com/clone/sector-by-sector-clone-or-not-8523.html

It worked great. Thanks. I'm up and running with my 500 GB ssd. Now I want  to replace 500 GB HDD with 250 GB SDD in mom's laptop. Is it all the same or do I have to teke special care? The amount of data on 500 GB HDD is less than 250 GB.

[Sport Driver]

Ok yeah it refuses to do clone. So what could I do?

[Senzelian]

6 hours ago, Sport Driver said:

Ok yeah it refuses to do clone. So what could I do?

 

In that case you have to clone without the sector-to-sector option enabled.

Sector to sector clones to not work, if the source drive is larger in size than the destination drive.

So:
 

250 GB -> 500 GB works.
500 GB -> 500 GB works.

500 GB -> 250 GB doesn't work.

[Sport Driver]

2 hours ago, Senzelian said:

 

In that case you have to clone without the sector-to-sector option enabled.

Sector to sector clones to not work, if the source drive is larger in size than the destination drive.

So:
 

250 GB -> 500 GB works.
500 GB -> 500 GB works.

500 GB -> 250 GB doesn't work.

Yeah it doesn't work without that option enabled either. Problem is partition on HDD is so big so it wants me to resize it first but it wants pro version for that. 

[Senzelian]

1 hour ago, Sport Driver said:

Yeah it doesn't work without that option enabled either. Problem is partition on HDD is so big so it wants me to resize it first but it wants pro version for that. 

Can you resize the partition within Windows Disk Management to a smaller size? If the actual data on it is less than 250GB in size, this should work.

[Sport Driver]

36 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

Can you resize the partition within Windows Disk Management to a smaller size? If the actual data on it is less than 250GB in size, this should work.

Yeah taht is what I was thinking but is it safe? I won't lose any data? Only about 130 GB of 500 GB is used.

[Senzelian]

40 minutes ago, Sport Driver said:

Yeah taht is what I was thinking but is it safe? I won't lose any data? Only about 130 GB of 500 GB is used.

Let's say it should be safe. I'm of course no Microsoft representive and I can only say that I never had any issues with it.

I think it's best to backup important data and then do the resize and clone.