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March 28th, 2023 08:00

Clone Stock ssd to Crucial ssd failure

Dell G15 5520

Dell G15 5520

Purchased a Crucial 1TB drive to replace the 250Gb that came with my G15. The Acronis software that comes with the Crucial drive will only clone a Crucial to another Crucial. Can anyone suggest cloning software (preferrably free) to complete this task?

Thanks

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1.8K Posts

March 28th, 2023 08:00

Acronis can do it (not the Crucial-specific version you have, but rather the normal commercial release), but unsure what their free trial now includes. Macrium Reflect free trial can do it. But,

1. I gave support at the Acronis site for years. Often we saw that clones had issues booting. We recommended that users perform a sort of reverse clone, whereby the source disk is removed from the computer and the new target disk is installed. Then, boot from the recovery environment, usually on flash drive, to clone from the source disk in an external interface to the new internal target disk.

2. I and many other experts at the Acronis site recommend against cloning. Cloning is an "all or nothing" process. If something goes wrong, the user may end up with two unbootable drives and loss of data. Backup and recovery is a far safer method, and allows for multiple tries if the user is unfamiliar. Cloning has no advantage over full backup and restore, except a slight time saving at the expense of considerably more risk and complexity.

Along with safety, another advantage over cloning is that you can store multiple full disk images on a single external drive. To migrate to a new drive, remove the old drive from the computer, install the new drive, boot from the recovery media and perform a full disk restore of the disk image to the new drive. I have performed this process dozens of times to save systems with failing drives or simply to "roll back" the system after a new application install caused undesirable effects.

Do not have both drives in the computer when you boot from the new drive for the first time. That can result in both drives being unbootable.

Whenever touching components or working inside a computer, wear a grounded wrist strap, also called anti-static wrist strap, ESD wrist strap, or ground bracelet. It's a cheap and sensible precaution. Rest the laptop on an anti-static mat or at least a reasonable alternative such as corrugated cardboard.

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