Best Software to Clone OS?

Right im getting a new HDD (SSD) and i am going to be installing it in my in my desktop but was wondering how do i get my OS from my Hard drive to my new SSD? What would be the best software to use?

 

Given that an SSD is almost certainly smaller than your existing hard drive, your best course of action is a clean install. Filesystem shrinking is a very mixed bag of results, mostly negative.

I put my old drive in an external case, did a clean install following the instructions above (make sure you back up your activation BEFORE removing the existing drive), and then just copied the data over that I needed. Worked pretty well, and things are a bit faster than they were on the previous install. It will also make sure that your filesystem is formatted appropriately for an SSD (4k clusters and such).

 

reinstall?
that means ALOT of stuff that needs reinstalling

 

Yes, it can. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to go to a smaller drive.

 

the OS is on a 100gb Partition, the SSD is 160gb - does that help?

 

But what if he made an image of his current drive (not clone) to an external HD and then restored the image to his new SSD. I don't think there should be a problem restoring an image made with a program such as Acronis TI to a smaller drive as long as the image is smaller in size than the new drive.

I have always restored to a drive of the same or larger size but I don't see why this wouldn't work as the free space of the primary drive is usually ignored when making the image.

 

Maybe. Are the apps all installed to the OS partition? If not, then no, it won't help. If you only have data (ie, movie and music and other such files) on the non-OS partition, then you may be able to use something like Acronis TrueImage or something.

I can't help you specifically much with the software as I tend to use Linux, dd and gparted, which is not a solution for someone who is asking what software to use.

 

On my last 3 or 4 notebooks i have used Acronis® True Image Home 2010 to create a bookdisk, which i use on brand new notebooks, I boot straight into the bios and select boot cd, then i acronis to copy the whole hdd to an external hdd it`s normaly only around 30gb , so if i trash the os i can get it back to original on a couple of minutes.

 

right this is how i have it :

Hard drive 1 :

C Drive : OS, few apps, music, pictures and such
A Drive : Applications (most big ones gets installed here)

Hard drive 2 :

G Drive : All my games installed
M Drive : all my TV, movies and such

now with the above in mind what would my best bet be?

 

Clean install. Games pollute the registry with their installs pointing to various directories, so you can't really separate the two partitions like you're proposing without horribly breaking the system, unfortunately.

 

couldnt i just clone the drive or something and name it to C so that everything works well?

 

Windows is not built for that kind of stuff. I really wish I could give you an easy solution, but the situation is that a clean install actually is the easiest way you can get everything up and running properly. Blame Microsoft.

 

Was trying to do just this same thing today, and figured out on my own after using Win7 backup as well as Clonezilla software, that it wasn't going to work. I didn't have anything major though, and most everything was backed up on the external drive anywhere.

Finally decided to check here to see if I was missing something and saw this thread so I guess I'm not.

 

yah, just use a linux cloning distro, talks 10 minutes to download and burn an ISO, another half hour to set up the hardware (swapping hard drives, cabling up usb/ide/sata adapters, etc) and 30 seconds to boot the iso and start the process.

Instead of wasting your time cursing microsoft why not just grab a set of known-good tools for the task and get the job done? You'll be happier with the results.........