Disk Cloning software - Advice needed

irishbeast · July 10, 2021

Need a recommendation to copy/move by boot drive contents cts to a much larger SSD so that I can reassign windows to boot from the new SSD.

Currently have a 500meg SSD (Sata connection full size) and 1TB SSD SATA connection and a 1 TB nvme drive in my main machine. 2nd rig has 2 x 1tb (one m2, one normal SSD). 2.5TB total memory on main

Other machine has a 1TB m2 boot and a 1TB SSD sata connected drive.

I bid for a number of drives on ebay when I had too much to drink and ended up winning a load them all. Picked up a Western Digital 2TB drive for about 100 dollars whis it not bad at all, I have a snekaing suspicion is fake. I did point this out to seller and they offered a refund but the drive is functioning as expected so I may take my chances.. Currently using it as an external drive over USB 3 to move things from one PC to another, as the lower spec machine is actually a bit newer weirdly enough. Just a second machine I bought to avoid moving rigs around as I live between 2 properies.

I would like to get the 2TB drive as the boot drive on one of the machines without having to reinstall windows, I have single licenses for each version of windows but Microsoft sometimes throws a wobbly if I format a disk and try to use the key elsewhere. Which I understand but its still annoying as its all legit. Lets me install but have to authenticate.

Is if possible to clone the 500 meg drive to a 2TB and set it as the prrmary boot. Teh just remove the 500m and use it as removable storage semems simple enough but I have never done it. Software recommendation would be helpful

Thanks in advance

P.S For a bonus point is there any way of making the 2 PCs replicate each other so that software on one can be used on the other (licence permitting) and that save games, shortcuts ad everything are exactly the same. I Could probably do it by setting up a local LAN with roaming profile but thats a massive amoutof hassle for what I need, Not to mention expense. They are largely the same but sometimes I forgot that machine b doesn't have software x installed and so forth. So thought it worth asking the question.

Bitter · July 10, 2021

I've been using Clonezilla for about 20 years now, it works, it's simple, it's free, and it's it's own bootable operating system so you're not reliant on what OS is on which computer for clone work. It'll work on a Pentium 2, it'll work on a 10900K, it'll work on anything in between. I use Balena Etcher to write the bootable ISO to a thumb drive and go from that, but it's also burnable to CD/DVD if you have some reason to need to run it that way.