[SOLVED] Clone boot drive to a file?

[Skrybe]

I suspect my boot drive (970 EVO NVMe 1TB) may be dying so I've bought a new drive (980 Pro NVMe 2TB) to replace it. Normally I'd just put in both drives and clone one to the other, then remove the old one. However, on my mobo Asus Crosshair VII Hero Wifi) the second m.2 socket is covered by a heatsink which is located under the video card, which also requires removing the CPU... It's certainly doable, but it's a pain in the behind and it'll take an hour just removing and reseating the vid card and CPU because of the case and mobo design. Actually, it'll require multiple removals of CPU & vid card since running an NVMe drive in the m.2 socket with the heatsink on my particular mobo drops the Vid card PCIe lanes down. So I'd have to move it after cloning.

Anyway, wondering whether it'd be viable to image the boot drive to a file (I have a 4TB 860 QVO or a 16TB HDD in the PC with plenty of space on either). Then remove the old drive, switch in the new one and re-image it from the file? I assume that would still be possible, I mean we used to do that with Ghost back in the day. But I can't find an option to do that in my current software *

Alternatively, I have a PCIe riser card with an m.2 slot on it (came with the 970 evo) so I could always put that in, put the new drive into that and clone to there. If I do, I'm wondering whether it'll still work when switched to the m.2 slot on the mobo? In the past I've seen weirdness when moving drives onto different ports, maybe because a different controller is being used.

* I'll be using EaseUS PartitionMaster Pro 11 to do the cloning since I have a licensed copy (yay humblebundle). I am however, willing to use something else if there's a better choice and it's not expensive.

 

[USAFRet]

Anyway, wondering whether it'd be viable to image the boot drive to a file (I have a 4TB 860 QVO or a 16TB HDD in the PC with plenty of space on either). Then remove the old drive, switch in the new one and re-image it from the file? I assume that would still be possible, I mean we used to do that with Ghost back in the day. But I can't find an option to do that in my current software *

Yes.
Trivially done with Macrium Reflect.
The only other thing you'll need is a USB flash drive to boot from.

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1x m.2 slot with an Image

Assuming you have another drive with sufficient free space to hold the entirety of your current m.2 drive:

1. Download and install Macrium Reflect
2. Run that, and create a Rescue CD or USB (you'll use this later). "Other Tasks"
3. In the Macrium client, create an Image to some other drive. External USB HDD, maybe. Select all partitions. This results in a file of xxxx.mrimage
4. When done, power OFF.
5. Swap the 2 drives
6. Boot up from the Rescue USB you created earlier.
7. Recover, and tell it where the Image is that you created in step 3, and which drive to apply it to...the new m.2
8. Go, and wait until it finishes.
9. That's all...this should work.

 

[USAFRet]

* I'll be using EaseUS PartitionMaster Pro 11 to do the cloning since I have a licensed copy (yay humblebundle). I am however, willing to use something else if there's a better choice and it's not expensive.

The Free version of Macrium will do this.

 

[kerberos_20]

windows can do full drive image backup How to Create a System Image Backup in Windows 7, 8, or 10 (howtogeek.com)

 

[jojesa]

I have use several solutions, suchs as EasUS Todo Backup, Acronis True Image, even Windows 10 own backup solution to create and deploy whole disk images. They all have served me well.

I ususally create a backup image after a system setup, to protect data from a hard drive failure or OS crash or to restore a disk to a previous state.

I use a WinPE Bootable Disk to restore the backup disk image

 

[Skrybe]

Thanks for the answers. I'm a bit disappointed that EaseUS doesn't do it in partitionmaster. Seems like it's just a way to sell Backup as well

Both Macrium and the Windows backup tool look straight forward enough. I assume with the Windows backup tool I'll need to resize the restored partition manually afterwards whereas Macrium would do the resizing for me (since the destination drive is bigger than the original)?

 

[Skrybe]

Thought I'd update this now I've actually replaced the drive. Firstly, wound up buying a 970 EVO Plus 2TB because the 980 Pro I originally ordered never arrived and now Amazon (and everywhere else) wants to charge $200 more than what I paid sigh

Anyway, I didn't wind up cloning to a file after all. I figured I'd give the PCIe riser card a whirl first and fall back to Macrium if it didn't work. So, 970 EVO in mobo M2 slot and 970 EVO Plus in riser card, fired up Samsung Disk Migration and hit go. And it just did the job. Took a bit less than 10 minutes. Turned off the PC, pulled the 970 EVO and put the 970 EVO Plus in it's place and Windows booted just fine.

The only issue now, is that it's MBR not GPT (checked the old drive and it was MBR too). I tried using PartitionMaster to convert from MBR-GPT since it's non-destructive and it got through most of the process but then died at the last. I've tried it a couple times with the same result. The weird thing is Windows still boots just fine and runs perfectly, it's just stuck as MBR.

The mobo is UEFI (Asus Crosshair VII Hero WiFi) and the CSM is set to UEFI + Legacy. So I wouldn't think that would be a problem. Latest Samsung NVMe drivers (3.3) installed. At the moment I'd like to convert it to GPT but I'm not sure I want to keep wasting time on it.

edit: Just checked forcing the CSM to use UEFI only and it won't boot windows. Just keeps going to the EUFI settings. Tried turning off CSM entirely and the same result. So looks like Windows was installed in legacy mode so switching to UEFI only won't work. sigh