Backing Up Hard Drive to SSD

[Slotman]

I picked up a few SSD's and would like to convert from the old hard drive to SSD but dont want to run in to any type of CRC check failure or issue with windows adding SYSVOL and the drive not authentication.
This is a backup of a drive(s) that i have possession and have license dongles for.
Any type of program you have been successful with?

[Tilt]

I have a stand alone disk duplicator and tried to do that exact same thing with.  All indications on the duplicator were that it completed successfully, but when I put it in the machine it choked on it.  Can't remember what the error message was, but ended up manually reloading everything on the SSD.  I believe it was probably due to differences in drive size.  My original was 80GB, and the new SSD was 128GB.  I think the system probably saw the extra unallocated space and failed a check because of it.

[Slotman]

That's kinda my concern and since I don't have original loaders I may just have to hold off.
I could always load a game on a hard drive and than try to duplicate it. At least I won't brick a working hard drive while trying to learn what works and what doesn't.

[Tilt]

Without original loaders that's probably the best bet.  Whatever you do, don't hook connect the working drive to a Windows 10 machine or you probably will kill it.

[idesign]

I have a stand alone disk duplicator and tried to do that exact same thing with.  All indications on the duplicator were that it completed successfully, but when I put it in the machine it choked on it.  Can't remember what the error message was, but ended up manually reloading everything on the SSD.  I believe it was probably due to differences in drive size.  My original was 80GB, and the new SSD was 128GB.  I think the system probably saw the extra unallocated space and failed a check because of it.

I just backed up my SSD with Winimage.  It's slow to do it but the file can be used to create an exact working duplicate on any size drive as long as it's the same size or larger.  My original SSD in the brainbox was 80 gb, I restored it to a 150 gb drive and it works fine.  Using the Diagnostic I can see that the that it made the 150gb drive into a 80gb drive, wasting the the extra space.

[Tilt]

Your results were what I was expecting to see.  Maybe I'll try it again and see what happens.  My disk duplicator may not like the format of the drive?  The only status lights it has are for 25,50,75, & 100% completed.  If it runs into an error it will just hang up and never make it to 100%.  It went to 100%, but it didn't duplicate something correctly.

[Hertz14]

Without original loaders that's probably the best bet.  Whatever you do, don't hook connect the working drive to a Windows 10 machine or you probably will kill it.

What’s the story with windows 10?

[Tilt]

See Rick's post here:
http://newlifegames.com/nlg/index.php?topic=30788.msg162884#msg162884

[Hertz14]

Wow. 4 bytes. So windows 10 is like a dog marking its spot. Good to know- I’m still running 7, but considered upgrading a while back.

[Slotman]

I have a few softwares from the old network days where I was making a byte by byte backup of drives regardless of the size. I think easeus is one and I don't recall the other.


I'm going to load a platter drive with a game and OS than try to make a byte by byte copy to a SSD


I'll report back.

[rickhunter]

Clonezilla works using bit image mode. One step since you can duplicate the drive directly.  Basically uses Linux' dd command to duplicate the drive.  Make a bootable clonezilla flash drive and do a bit image clone.