Cloning Acronis versus Macrium - laptop drive, bootable

[pcumming]

I have used Acronis for years. In order to clone a laptop drive I have been told to take out the internal laptop drive and attach via USB. Then put drive I want to clone TO in the laptop. Then I would boot with the Acronis USB media I had created. I would clone from the Source (external USB former internal laptop drive) to the laptop drive I just inserted. When done I would remove the USB cable and could boot directly from the drive in the laptop if desired. Have tried this and it works fine using Windows 8.1 (Do not have Win 10 at this time).

Macrium--from what I read in several places (I do not own software yet) you DO NOT have to take out the current internal laptop drive and attach as USB. You would simply attach a new or previous drive to the laptop via USB then run the clone option. This will create a bootable drive that when done I could insert in the laptop to boot.

Is this correct?

Thank you very much
Peter

 

[USAFRet]

Yes, that is correct.

Install the Macrium application on the current drive
Connect the new drive externally, do the clone thing.
When it finishes...power off
Swap the drives, leaving the old drive disconnected.
Power up
It should work.

 

[pcumming]

Is it better (or possible) to boot off a Macrium boot USB key before a cloning as opposed to running software within Windows on the system you want to clone to USB drive? Thank you, Peter

 

[USAFRet]

Is it better (or possible) to boot off a Macrium boot USB key before a cloning as opposed to running software within Windows on the system you want to clone to USB drive? Thank you, Peter

Not necessarily better, but I believe it is possible.

Create a Macrium Rescue USB or CD, boot from that, and do your thing.