cloning and stuff with Macrium Reflect Free

[Pachuca]

Someone recommended using Macrium Reflect for cloning a drive in another post. I gave it a shot because the NTI Echo 3 software that came with my new Plextor m6 ssd wasn't working at all and I didn't feel like troubleshooting it. So to save time I went and downloaded Macrium, which worked great by the way. I don't know much about cloning drives so I hope someone would elaborate a bit. As I mentioned earlier I have a Plextor m6 I also have a Samsung PM830 which my main boot device and is a bit old. I wanted to clone my windows 10 onto the new Plextor drive and use the old samsung as a storage device  since it will most likely fail in the coming year or two. I could put my games on it which I can always download again if the drive fails. I ran the macrium software and cloned my drive from the samsung onto the plextor. I noticed a big difference in the amount of free space on the plextor after I finished cloning. I didn't mention this earlier, but both drives are 256gb ssd and when I cloned the drive there's about a 22.3 GB difference in terms of space between the two drives. I'm not exactly sure what the reason for that is and I would love to format the samsung and use the plextor as my boot device, but I don't want to find out later that those 22.3 GB of data were important. Which brings me to my question, is it safe to format a drive on the same mobo after it has been cloned to another drive? They both share the same mobo. Please let me know your thoughts, opinions, jokes, what ever... thanks in advance LTT community! 

[Pachuca]

reading my own post feels like it's more of a rant than an actual question lol. Anyway would still appreciate people's input on this issue.

[Psycosis86]

Total guess here, but there may be a partition on the Samsung drive for recovery. You can see if this is the case, by going into Disk Management.

[Pachuca]

2 hours ago, Psycosis86 said:

Total guess here, but there may be a partition on the Samsung drive for recovery. You can see if this is the case, by going into Disk Management.

there is one, but I want to format the drive and use it just for storing things. I have a recovery partition on both drives, i'm just worried if there is a possibility that my image somehow goes bad and than the drive becomes completely unrecoverable? I guess i'll just risk it and wipe the old samsung. If anything goes bad I still have a back up image on my external hdd. My question is mainly about the risk, if any, associated with using a cloned drive in place of the original. 

[SydneySideSteveSomewheres]

Hi Pachuca,

There should be no discernible difference between the two drive images. You can prove this by attaching both drives and booting the machine. Windows should declare a conflict and ask for user input,as it will detect the same OS at both locations. 

Before wiping the old C: drive; (a) from the Windows desktop place your OS install disc *.iso in the DVD drive and run the *.exe program (or USB stick). Select "repair" my install and allow the program to run, if none of the installed programs have conflicts nothing should change. (b) create a new external recovery (and/or recovery partition) image and then recover the installation to another old drive, this will validate your stored recovery image files. (c) now your fail-over options are proven, you should be safe to format the old OS drive!

Sorry about the long-winded reply, hope this helps.