Macrium cloning - 2 surprising problems

I upgraded the M.2 SSD in my Dell Inspiron 15 laptop to a larger M.2 SSD (went from 256 to 512GB).  I had no way to clone since it was an M.2 SSD and only one slot.  I used Macrium Reflect V7 (Free) to image the entire 256GB SSD (all partitions) to an external USB connected Drive.  I then removed the 256 M.2 SSD and installed the 512.  I booted with a USB Flash Drive (Macrium Rescue Media) and then did a restore from the external USB drive to the new 512GB M.2 SSD.  It was successful (test booted).  The restore only configured the new larger drive for 256GB (it would do the same thing on a Clone) and I used the free version of "Mini Tool Partition Wizard" to reclaim the unused 256GB partition.  

On cloning make sure you clone the entire drive, not just the "C" partition.  I ran into that a couple years ago trying to close a drive to a larger drive.  I didn't clone the entire drive and it didn't work.

There is also the possibility cloning will not work for you.  We did some testing on the sevenforums.com with our software "guru" and his testing showed cloning was a hit or miss.  Works for some, does not work for others.  If you are one that it doesn't work, then you will have to do the disc image as I noted above.

MiniTool Partition Wizard:

https://www.partitionwizard.com/

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@Niloc1017wrote:

Problem 1: my Dell Optiplex 3020, has an 60 GB SSD which I cloned to a new & larger 120 GB SSD, using Macrium Free via a USB stick.

The cloning was quick & went with no errors. After a shutdown, I removed the new 120 GB SSD, & rebooted to my smaller SDD. That was the plan! But all I got was 'Boot Manager is missing' !! I've never had that message before, so I assume that Macrium caused a problem with BootMgr in my Sys Res partition. I was able to restore BootMgr using Disk Part. But why did this happen?

Has anyone experienced this problem? Your advice & ideas would be welcome.

PS - I've yet to boot test the 120 GB cloned SSD, but wonder if its BootMgr will also be missing?

 

 

Well, I only Clone when ready to swap the drives. You were suppose to boot on the 120gb SSD.

And in general, I almost never Clone. I Image to File on external USB-HDD instead (with Verify option). This allows a bare-metal boot and restore to new drive (with only it connected).

Hi Fireberd - very many thanks for a most helpful reply. It's interesting that you found using Macrium for a system image actually works better than cloning. So I'll give that a try next time, when my backup is due.

Yes, I did clone the entire drive, which included the 100Mb sys res partition. As Macrium somehow corrupted/deleted the BootMgr in the 100Mb partition, I've done some experiments on a spare PC to see how easy it is to remove the 100Mb res partition. This is how I did it:-

I installed Win7 so it would create that 100Mb res partition. I then used Macrium on a USB stick to make a system image of the entire drive. I then deleted the partition, rebooted to Macrium & restored the backed up image. The restore was 100% successful.

Next, I downloaded & installed EasyBCD, & ran it to make my C: partition the active boot drive. EasyBCD copied the handful of boot files from the 100Mb res partition, & was so easy & quick to use!

After a successful reboot, I deleted the 100Mb res partition in Disk Management. A further reboot confirmed getting rid of the 100Mb partition worked! Cloning or imaging my drive now, shouldn't give any problems.

Thanks for your helpful comments once again.

Kind regards, Niloc1017
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Dell Optiplex 3020 Mini Tower, Intel quad core i5-4460S 2.9 GHz. 64GB SSD with Win7 SP1, 500GB 3.5 HDD for all non-system stuff, optical drive, 8GB ram

I tried to clone my production Win 10 system from a 120GB to 500GB SSD and never got a good clone.  I tried the cloning program provided with my new Samsung EVO 850 SSD and it failed.  I tried Macriun Reflect V6 (Paid version) and one other free disc image/clone program and they all failed, at different points trying to boot with the cloned drive.  I went the image route and it worked OK.

I did get a "good" clone one time with Macrium Reflect V7 (free version).  I cloned the drive on my Windows Insider install (a dual boot with my production Win 10) that was on a smaller SSD and I needed more space for my recording studio software that I installed on the Insider version for testing.  I did a clone of that drive and it worked OK, no problems.  Just had to recover the unused partition since the new SSD was larger.  

As I noted, there was some exhaustive Clone testing, on the sevenforums.com a the forum software guru.  He tried many cloning programs using Win 7 and even using Linux.  The final conclusion was it was a "hit or miss" operation, worked for some and not for others but no direct correlation.