mirroring old HDD to SSD for dads old laptop help.

[pinky33]

So my dad has and old dell inspiron 5720 from 12 years ago. Had a WDC WD10jpvt-75a1yt0 , Basically 1TB western digital blue HDD. I plan to buy some 256, 512GB, or 1TB 2.5" SSD from microcenter and attempt to clone and install. He only uses like 100GB.

There are some Youtube vids, but looking to this community to recommend a cloning software that is free and works well.

My plan is to remove HDD, hook old HDD and new SSD to my desktop and clone.....unless there is a better way?

This will happen when my dad comes back from his trip in 6 weeks.

 

[EarthDog]

Macrium Reflect (my preferred)...Clonezilla...Acronis... all have free options.

 

[Flamethrower1972]

So my dad has and old dell inspiron 5720 from 12 years ago. Had a WDC WD10jpvt-75a1yt0 , Basically 1TB western digital blue HDD. I plan to buy some 256, 512GB, or 1TB 2.5" SSD from microcenter and attempt to clone and install. He only uses like 100GB.

There are some Youtube vids, but looking to this community to recommend a cloning software that is free and works well.

My plan is to remove HDD, hook old HDD and new SSD to my desktop and clone.....unless there is a better way?

This will happen when my dad comes back from his trip in 6 weeks.

I use MiniTool Parition Wizard Free 10. Very Easy to use.

Download MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition 10.0 for windows - Filepuma.com

MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition All-in-One Free Disk Partition Manager Tool for Windows PC

www.filepuma.com

 

[dejo]

Western Digital and Samsung have clone utilities that are available to do just this, that are free for those with the respective drives you purchase.

 

[JLK03F150]

Western Digital and Samsung have clone utilities that are available to do just this, that are free for those with the respective drives you purchase.

Yes, WD uses a free version of Acronis True Image. I used it. I liked it.

 

[Flamethrower1972]

Yes, WD uses a free version of Acronis True Image. I used it. I liked it.

Cant beat free.

 

[don256us]

I have mainly used Macrium free for instances like this. The biggest issue you'll have is getting a 1TB image onto a smaller drive. Cloning hardware does not like it and will not do it. Thus you have to use a software based cloning system. Essentially, you have to reduce the source drive down below the destination drive. I usually go smaller than the target then enlarge it when I'm done to use the whole thing.

The other issue that I run into, and don't have a good solution for, is that OEM installed OS has a recovery partition and sometimes hidden partitions that don't like to be resized/cloned. I usually try to just clone the OS partition and let the rest go. I have more success than failure but I still have a lot of failure.

I would sugest that you copy all of his data first just in case it all goes south.