Hard drive cloning

Jesmond · 10 Oct 2011 at 12:32

Hi
I have just bought an SSD to go in my net book ans I am not sure of the best way to clone the hard drive that is in the net book at the moment.
I was thinking that putting them both in my main PC to do it but not sure if that is the best way or should I use my USB to SATA lead (if I can find it) and do it on the net book. Also is there any Freeware programs that will do it.
Thanks

skyripper · 10 Oct 2011 at 13:18

You've got to take your drive out of your netbook sometime, so I'd just put it in the desktop as an additional drive, put the SSD in as an additional drive and use Acronis (theres a Trial period) or MiniTool Partition Wizard to copy it across.

g_tripwood · 10 Oct 2011 at 16:24

skyripper said:
You've got to take your drive out of your netbook sometime, so I'd just put it in the desktop as an additional drive, put the SSD in as an additional drive and use Acronis (theres a Trial period) or MiniTool Partition Wizard to copy it across.

What he said - that's about the best way to do it!

Philtor · 10 Oct 2011 at 18:36

Macrium reflect have a free version and it's excellent. Well worth checking out.

AnastieByte · 10 Oct 2011 at 18:50

philtorrens said:
Macrium reflect have a free version and it's excellent. Well worth checking out.

+1. I tried this over the weekend and it cloned my 80GB SSD in less than 17 minutes without issue. Highly recommended.

Ringiho · 10 Oct 2011 at 19:39

Clonezilla is always worth a look!

biuro74 · 11 Oct 2011 at 13:25

Yep, cloning TWO SSDs is a godd idea, but cloning HARD DRIVE to SSD - it's not. It's due to drivers that are set up for HDD and which might not be set to AHCI mode (and BIOS, too, by the way). I'd go for Win install + do Windows score + manual removing hiberfill + manual set up swap + disable some services (indexing, prefetch etc).

Jesmond · 11 Oct 2011 at 19:58

biuro74 said:
Yep, cloning TWO SSDs is a godd idea, but cloning HARD DRIVE to SSD - it's not. It's due to drivers that are set up for HDD and which might not be set to AHCI mode (and BIOS, too, by the way). I'd go for Win install + do Windows score + manual removing hiberfill + manual set up swap + disable some services (indexing, prefetch etc).

OK but you lost me after the win install.
The net book has got XP Home on it but I have got XP Professional that I can put on but then I will have to re install and set up some of the programs that I use and some of them were a nightmare.