Upgrading from 256 to 500gb SSD - best way to image?

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ryanjg11

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I'm upgrading from a Samsung 840 Pro 256gb SSD to a Samsung 850 EVO 500gb SSD and would like to make a perfect disc image of my C:\ drive. Wondering what the preferred software tool would be to do this, with minimal hassle. Can be freeware or commercially available. Or built into the OS - I'm using Windows 10 Professional. Thanks!
 
ryanjg11 said:
I'm upgrading from a Samsung 840 Pro 256gb SSD to a Samsung 850 EVO 500gb SSD and would like to make a perfect disc image of my C:\ drive. Wondering what the preferred software tool would be to do this, with minimal hassle. Can be freeware or commercially available. Or built into the OS - I'm using Windows 10 Professional. Thanks!
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The free Samsung Magician Software can do this. Hope this helps.
 
You can also use built-in Windows system image tool.

If whatever software you use gives you a 256GB partition afterwards with the other 256 being unused, go into Windows Computer Management and say Expand partition for C drive to add in unused space.
 
jmilcher said:
EaseUS to-do free edition. Does this amazingly well.
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I used this recently on a work computer to clone a hard disc drive to a solid state drive. Worked great. Well actually there was one issue, the SSD had previously been formatted in GPT, but the computer used MBR. The software cloned the drive, but didn't pick up the MBR change so it wouldn't boot. I reformatted the drive in Windows as MBR and then recloned and it booted up perfect after that.
 
When I used Samsung Magician to transfer my Win10, it left the recovery partition behind. Not sure if I missed an option.
 
Thanks all - I ended up using the Samsung Data Migration tool... I don't think Magician offers this built-in, right?

Anyway, worked surprisingly well. Crashed the first time I attempted to clone, but I think that's because the source drive was BitLocker encrypted. Once I decrypted the drive, it cloned just fine.

Literally swapped the drive, thought in my head "there's about a 10% chance this is just going to work," and voila, it booted right into Windows - didn't even have to go into the BIOS to fiddle with boot priorities. Life has gotten a lot easier, right?

Only slight difficulty I had - RAPID mode was still enabled on the old 840 PRO, even though I had removed it. I ended up having to disable it, and couldn't re-enable it because my older version of Magician couldn't detect my OS (Win10 Pro) for some reason. Ended up downloading the latest version of Magician and RAPID mode is now enabled.
 
I've used the EaseUS software. It is pretty straightforward, fast, efficient, and has no problems creating a perfect clone of your C drive.
 
brentsg said:
When I used Samsung Magician to transfer my Win10, it left the recovery partition behind. Not sure if I missed an option.
Click to expand...
That's why I use the EaseUS to-do free edition. It does a bit for bit clone by default choosing all partitions and automatically resizing the new drive partition. Of course you can change anything you want.
 
Acronis True Image can do this. I recently used a modified recovery / boot image on a flash drive to clone an Intel 750 800GB to a 1.2TB SSD 750.
 
obviously i am late, but how did this make it more than 30 seconds before someone mentioned gparted live or parted magic? at no point is anything other than 1 of those even necessary.
 
gparted live usb or cd.

Copy the whole partition to the new drive, and then expand it to fill the extra space. Easy.
 
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