Windows 7: Image your system with free Macrium

So my attempts at using macrium, to clone to the 3rd partition of HD did not work i.e. the process erased all of my mac-mini cloned stuff on the 1st partition. After two tries with same result, decided best to get sperate external HD for my PC.



I seem to recall some years back that a PC and mac can cloned to same HD. I dunno but it didn't work for me so;

I found a used Western Digtial with USB ports but fear they might only be 1.0 and clone my PC via Macrium.

Didn't do exactly what I expected but at least it said it cloned successfully. So now, since I can't find info to tell me if Eeternal HD uses 2.0 or 1.0, I thought I would just try and boot from it, and as that is my hope, and will maybe have my answer to the port value.

So what keys do hold to get optional drives to boot from? Or does it work some othere way on a Toshiba PC?

Thanks Rsix

I tried this program, and selected the "clone this drive option". It created the partitions to match my original drive, but the clone took hours for 131 GB of data and failed. All I got on boot on the new drive was a flashing cursor. Waste of time.

You apparently made a mistake somewhere along the line. I suggest you make a trial run with a small (e.g. 2GB) partition with some data copied into it. That goes fast and you will immediately know where it fails. Then we can discuss it again.

For the full job. I suggest to image/restore the partitions individually.

Here is a more extensive tutorial I made. Maybe it helps: Imaging with free Macrium

Actually, I only told it to clone two of the partitions. One of them is a "Recovery" partition that Dell puts there, and I didn't tell it to clone that. It made the partition of the same size anyway, but didn't format it and didn't copy any of that data over. That partition is not needed to boot windows. In fact, it is never used other than in Dell's special recovery utility.

All of the other data from the other two partitions was copied over, but Windows would not function. I can't imagine anything I could have done. It was only a few mouse clicks. After starting the program, I clicked on the source drive, clicked "Clone this drive", and then told it which was the destination drive. It took a couple hours to complete. Then it didn't work. If it can't handle cloning drives of 131 Gb in files, then it is no good to me anyway. I don't have any drives with a small 2Gb partition anyway.

I suggest you look into your Disk Management. On Dell systems, the recovery partition is usually the active partition that contains the bootmgr. Without it, the system will not boot.

If you have a chance. post a picture of your Disk Management.

Understand that just now I found another program called "Samsung Data Migration" and it appears to be in the process of cloning the drive. We will see how that works out. Because of that, the new SSD looks like an unpartitioned drive in this screen shot:





When I used Macrium, I did not clone that Recovery partition. Perhaps that was the problem.

I don't know if this works for anything other than Samsung drives. Three clicks of the mouse after installation and it was up and running. Fingers crossed here....

1. as I suspected, your recovery partition is the active partition with the bootmgr. That is vital. If you want to get rid of it on the SSD, move (copy) the bootmgr to C - Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD Then you can forget about it.

2. That Samsung tool looks like the Paragon Migration tool. That one I have used and it works very well. One of the good things is that it aligns the SSD which is of utmost importance.

3. If that does not work, get back and we'll start at square 1.

PS: Your snip of Disk Management has only limited value. See my example.

Like this:
Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image