A couple of questions on OS disk cloning

pilsburypie · 26 Jun 2013 at 14:57

Just been reading a bit about this and I was thinking of doing so for 2 reasons. Firstly for a safety net should anything go wrong, secondly because my 120GB SSD is filling up and I may need to transfer to a bigger one in the future.

How does the Windows 7 one fair? Some seem to say it is decent. Other suggest Paragon Backup and Recovery Free or Macrium reflect.

I have all my programs on the OS drive - will all the registration passwords be transferred?

Thanks in advance.

dmsims · 26 Jun 2013 at 22:09

The win7 one is OK

Macrium compresses images much better

It's an image and is agnostic of any content

~Dockie · 26 Jun 2013 at 23:08

i've used macrium a few times, and its amazing for freeware.

Sin_Chase · 26 Jun 2013 at 23:29

pilsburypie said:
I have all my programs on the OS drive - will all the registration passwords be transferred?

Yes, it's an image.

Macrium Reflect Free is very good and also allows you to mount the image file as a browsable directory structure.

pilsburypie · 27 Jun 2013 at 09:42

Cheers for your help peeps.... much appreciated.

-BA- · 17 Aug 2013 at 23:30

Hi guys

I am trying to use Macrium to clone my 64GB Crucial M4 so that I can move the image to a 128GB M4. The problem I am having though is that it is just stuck at the Creating Volume Snapshot procedure and shows no progress whatsoever.

I have checked that the VSS service is running and it is but haven't a clue what else to try to do to fix this. Does the new 128GB M4 need to be initialised first? If so, MBR or GPT?

Any suggestions gratefully received as I really need to get this SSD cloned.

bledd · 18 Aug 2013 at 09:34

-Get Macrium to create a live boot cd and make your image from that.

What I do is..

-Create disc
Clean up desktop/my docs/photos/music/ clear downloads folder
Disable System Restore (probably ignored anyway)
Run CCleaner to clear out temp files.

Reboot with disc in and create image.

There's usually a ton of folders on C:\ that you can safely remove..

Ie C:\Intel
C:\Nvidia
C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Installer2

-BA- · 18 Aug 2013 at 10:23

Whether I clone or create image, it still seems to hang on the Creating Volume Shapshot. Any ideas?

brendy · 18 Aug 2013 at 10:30

To add another option, acronis true image with universal restore works really well also.
I use a lot of hp probooks in work and initially took an image from my 4740s windows7 pro and use it to downgrade all of the new 4540s units that I buy in as none of my users like windows 8 having been shown it beforehand (that is a different issue altogether!). Differences in hardware makes no difference and have yet to see any failures.

-BA- · 18 Aug 2013 at 15:47

Well I could get Macrium to work whatsoever but have managed to complete the clone with Easy ToDo Backup and expanded the volume in Windows. All seems to be working fine.

Interestingly Easy ToDo would not recognise the disk until I had initialised it unlike Macrium which could see it but just wouldn't take snapshots.