Clone HDD to SSD

I had a bad experience with Acronis True Image a couple of years ago and would never recommend it. Macrium Reflect is fine.

Hi,

After cloning a HDD to a SSD make sure Windows sees it as a SSD and not a HDD.
If it is not seen correctly run Winsat Disk from an elevated command prompt.

Definitely a MR Free fan here.

Cheers,

Here's my two cents.
"....it is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing."

After spending two days trying to clone my existing HDD in my old Dell XPS 8500, running Windows 10 Pro 64, onto a new Samsung 860 EVO SSD, using (at least attempting to) 3 different software vendor's products, Acronis True Image 2015 OEM (it would install, but would not run) Macrium Reflect 7 Free, and Aomei Backupper, I've concluded that if the program doesn't perform the cloning procedure outside of Windows then the chance of failure is high. There are just too many things going on on an active HDD that can make the operation either fail or give you a clone that won't boot the PC.

What I finally did after giving up on letting the cloning function proceed while the Source Drive is running Windows 10 was I created a Windows PE USB drive (using the Macrium Reflect 7 Free installed on the PC, they have a utility included that will load everything on a USB drive) then booted the PC with the USB drive and then performed the clone operation from there. The total time to complete the process was less than half the best time I ever saw running either Reflect or Backupper via Windows (the Acronis True Image 2015 runs the cloning operation outside of Windows and I assume it would have worked fine if it didn't crash) and the new SSD worked perfectly afterwards.

I prefer to use imaging rather than cloning which avoids problems you can have with conflicting disk IDs

I am not sure if this is legit, but you can install the trial version of Acronis True Image and then from Tools create an Acronis Boot Rescue CD-ROM or USB Flash drive. Then you can use this Rescue CD or USB for all your cloning or backup needs, no activation required. Just boot from it and clone or backup your source to the SSD. If the disk contains some logical errors ("dirty bit" is enabled) then Acronis will only allow a sector-by-sector copy which of course cannot be done unless the target disk is the same or greater capacity. So before cloning or backup make sure you run check disk (chkdsk /f) from a Windows command prompt to fix any errors.

spapakons said:

I am not sure if this is legit, but you can install the trial version of Acronis True Image and then from Tools create an Acronis Boot Rescue CD-ROM or USB Flash drive. Then you can use this Rescue CD or USB for all your cloning or backup needs, no activation required. Just boot from it and clone or backup your source to the SSD. If the disk contains some logical errors ("dirty bit" is enabled) then Acronis will only allow a sector-by-sector copy which of course cannot be done unless the target disk is the same or greater capacity. So before cloning or backup make sure you run check disk (chkdsk /f) from a Windows command prompt to fix any errors.

Best of luck trying to remove all traces of Acronis software if you want to uninstall it!

You can use YourUninstaller or IO-bit Uninstaller or similar to completely remove all traces.