drive cloning tool?

[eagl]

Anyone have any recommendations for drive cloning software?  My OEM HD doesn't want to let me restore to a new larger HD, and the free cloning apps I've found usually have one limitation or another that make them not ideal.  The OEM drive needs to have 3 partitions (win7 boot, win7 OS, and restore partition) and I'd like the cloning utility to let me put all the extra space into the OS partition, but the cloning tools I've found seem to want to spread the extra space among all 3 partitions, which is a complete waste and will result in some space permanently lost in the recovery partition.

Even the tool that came with my new Samsung SSD (yea) only clones from the C drive, which is stupid because the whole reason I got the new SSD is because my install is currently spread around on 2 drives.  The idiot Samsung software won't let me choose the source drive, and the boot SSD isn't the drive I need to have cloned.

So...  Any recommendations for drive cloning tools?

[katanaso]

What type of source drive?
What type of destination drive?
What about cloning then extending the partition afterwards using another product?

[633DH98]

Have you looked into Clonezilla and Gparted?

[Bino]

Here's a review of drive cloning tools:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421302,00.asp

[BaldEagl]

I've generally used the manufacturer's freeware (Seagate Seatools or WD Drive Wizard) but I've also used EASUS for various things.  One of the nice thngs you can do with EASUS is grab partitions and drag them to change partition sizes which you could do with your OEM software after it spreads the extra space around.  Acronis is supposed to be good to but I've never tried it.  EASUS has a free version.

[eagl]

Thanks.  My laptop was using a smallish (80GB) mSATA SSD for boot, and a 320GB spinny drive for data.  The problem is that the spinny drive has all the OEM recovery software and partition on it.  I'm replacing both drives with a 750GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD.  The Samsung clone software will only clone the boot drive and doesn't allow me to choose a different source drive, which is retarded and it pretty much means I won't be recommending Samsung SSDs to anyone but uber computer geeks anymore.  It's a dumb restriction and trying to lock it down has lost them a customer.

Anyhow...

What I've done so far is I used a crappy drive cloning tool that automatically resized all 3 partitions on the OEM spinny drive, adding unnecessary space to the win7 boot partition and the recovery partition.  If I can repair that then I'll leave it as is.  But if not, then I"ll need to keep trying other utilities.  Which is a pain because every time I have to go back and start over again, I have to tear apart the laptop to put back in and later remove both the mSATA drive and the spinny drive, plus updating windows and either updating or tossing out the manufacturer's utilities is very time consuming.

I'll give some of those tools mentioned in the thread a try, thanks again.

[FLS]

WD has a free version of Acronis but it only works if one of the drives is WD.

[jigsaw]

I've been using Acronis to backup my drives for several years and have been very happy with it. It has options to directly clone a drive.  Before Acronis I was using Norton *spit* Ghost to clone.

[Estes]

I've been using Acronis to backup my drives for several years and have been very happy with it. It has options to directly clone a drive.  Before Acronis I was using Norton *spit* Ghost to clone.

+1. Silat/lew turned me on to Acronis and it has saved my bellybutton a couple times.

[Brooke]

I've used Clonezilla.  Not the easiest to use, but free and seemingly capable.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

See Rule #4

[eagl]

See Rule #4

[MrRiplEy[H]]

See Rule #4

[Chalenge]

Acronis True Image is what I have used for more than a decade. It's the best way to recover from a full blown disaster, too.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Skuzzman is trigger happy today