I use EaseUS Partition Master 9.1.1 Home Edition. It is free for non-commercial use. This allowed me to create a Primary Partition on my new 1Tb Hitachi drive. My SSD was 240 Gb. So I left a little extra space. I made the Primary Partition on the Hitachi 256 Gb. You must create a Primary partition first.
I used the same program to create a secondary partition on the same Hitachi drive (something like 735 Gb). This will be for data. I believe I am correct that only the Primary partition can be used for booting. (So the clone should only be copied to the Primary partition -see below. WARNING: COPYING THE SSD CLONE WILL DESTROY ANYTHING ALREADY STORED IN THAT PRIMARY PARTITION.) Each of these two partitions will have a drive letter, like E, F, or K, etc. You can format one partition without it having an effect on the other.
Then I used Drive Image XML Version 2.44 for cloning the SSD to the Hitachi Primary partition. Again, this is free for non-commercial use.
It has a function called Disk to Disk. That makes a cloned copy of a partition on another disk drive. You will recall I created a 256 Gb Primary partition. What the clone will do is resize that partition to whatever size your SSD is. It seems like mine came to something like 233 Gb. That means that there will be 23 Gb of unallocated space when I've finished. You can be more conservative on how much extra space you use when you originally setup the Primary Partition.
This cloning process should only affect the Primary partition. The process has no effect on data stored on secondary partitions UNLESS the clone is larger than the partition space established when the primary partition was created. That's why I created more than enough space.
Please let me say this for clarity. I have not extensively tested the cloned version on my computer. It did boot up. But I did not test it repeatedly to see if that was just a fluke and to determine if all the software works. Please report back with your results if you attempt it and experience problems. I don't want to be counting on a flawed procedure and have it bite my butt later on.
BTW, I've read somewhere that this cloning process will not work with external drives. You can send out the clone to an external drive - but it usually won't boot. Microsoft has always been afraid people would use this to pirate their software. So there are hidden complications in there to prevent this working.
I know this is running long, but let me mention one more thing. What got me started on this was wanting to make use of a backup 'server' I created using Windows 8 Drive Storage. I wanted to be able to backup the all the boot drives on our home computers across our network to this Windows 8 Drive Storage pool I created. I've learned this. You cannot just copy a cloned image. Remember the cloning process I described has to have the freedom to resize and adjust other parameters of the partition where it is going. So it would be destructive to hardware and software RAID configurations, like Drive Storage.
This is a case where making a mirror image would be useful. It can be stored on a spare drive, a backup server, in a cloud, etc. Drive Image XML will create the backup images for that too. Those images can be moved around with impunity. Then you could use them to do a regular Restore to any disk. And yes, this will allow you to RESTORE your system so it will boot and your software and settings are like they were when you made the backup.
I'm having trouble figuring out how to setup automatic scheduling of this clone process in Drive Image. I'd be interested to hear from others who can figure it out. (I'm not into reinventing the wheel.)
I don't want to come across as some kind of expert on this. I AM NOT!!!. I'm experimenting and learning as I go. I'd appreciate someone willing to collaborate and check my facts so we can share what we've learned.
Anyway, I hope this helps somebody.
BachOn
P.S. Yes. I plan to use the clone of my SSD stored on of my Hitachi to write back to the SSD if it fails. Only time will tell if it works.
