Imaging "C:\"

Again, many thanks to you all for taking the time to reply.

Last night I downloaded V5 of Macrium Reflect and it does support cloning. There is a good demo on Youtube (can't find it now!) showing how to drag and drop all partitions of the boot disk for cloning.

I'm going to carry out this operation this week and will post back details on how things went.

One question which hasn't yet been answered is how much, if any, benefit may I expect from using a 7,200 rpm disk in place of a 5,400 disk?

Once again, many thanks to you all.

beauparc said:

One question which hasn't yet been answered is how much, if any, benefit may I expect from using a 7,200 rpm disk in place of a 5,400 disk?

Well obviously you will get faster read/writes, but not as noticeably as with an SSD.

I would not want a 5400rpm HD. A friend's has a 2 minute startup traced only to that. Dell paired a 5400 with Core2Duo which also tells a lot about Dell.

Thanks Gregrocker, just as I thought.

Transfer rate is quite a bit faster on the outer tracks. I would recommend an OS/ installed programs partition of around 100-200GB as the second partition after the system reserved (if you have one). If you have a system reserved it is better to make it ~200MB than the default 100MB to avoid shadow storage copy issues when using Windows imaging.

The 7200rpm vs 5400rpm and outer tracks is all about radial velocity/transfer speed.

Well.....that was a lot easier than I had expected!

First of all I cleaned the target disk as advised. I then ran the cloning tool in Macrium. It stopped with an error - something to do with "pipelines". Rebooted and ran it again with same error.

Looking on my machine I found a copy of Easeus. Found the cloning option and tried that.

Perfect. It took about an hour to do it's thing and all seemed good.

Restart, into BIOS and reset boot order.

Bingo! Here I am running off the cloned disk without any worries. I'll use it like this for a while to make sure everything is running properly before I do anything else.

Thanks to everyone for the help and advice. It really was greatly appreciated.