Cloning vs Imaging boot drive upgrade

I always do this using Macrium Reflect and imaging. I had a bad experience with Acronis software a while ago and haven't touched this poorly engineered product since.

X570 and later (including B550)=PCIe gen 4.0 supported. (along with a 3rd-gen Ryzen and later socket AM4 Ryzens)

Hello @Merrlin,

Just for information that you might find interesting and using Macrium Reflect as an example . . .

Cloning Versus Imaging:

Cloning Versus Imaging:

Cloning is a one-step process that transfers the contents of 1 drive to another in real time. The target drive is immediately bootable if the cloning succeeds.

Macrium imaging merely creates a file with an mrimg extension. A very big file. You save it like any other file. You can move or copy it like any other file. It is largely useless in that state. It becomes useful when you formally "restore" it to some other drive, at which point that drive is immediately bootable. You can make a new image every day, week, or whenever, and keep as many as you like if you have the space. Or delete them at will. Each would represent your hard drive's state as of the moment the image file was made.

Imaging is done on a partition by partition basis. You choose which partitions to include in the image. You choose which partitions to restore. You wouldn't need the Macrium recovery media on the USB stick IF your hard drive is still bootable and you can still run Macrium from it. The stick would lead you to the same interface as opening Macrium from your hard drive, but it's much slower due to USB speed.

Cloning Versus Imaging - Additional:

When you clone a drive [ OLD ] to another [ NEW ] drive, you clone all the data on the partition [ every partition has an ID ] to a partition on the other drive [ NEW ], but, the partition [ source and target ] has different ID's. The bootloader of the cloned drive [ NEW ] is pointing to the partition ID of the OLD drive. To correct this, you should boot from the Win 10 installation media [ USB ] and do a boot repair so it points to the correct partition [ NEW ].

I hope this helps.