I want to clone my WIN 7 Pro C partition to my new solid state drive

[Banzer]

Hello all, thanks in advance for any help.

current setup

C Drive - 400 GB partition on new 2 TB Seagate drive
D Drive - 500 GB partition on same Seagate drive
F Drive - leftover partition from above Seagate drive (around 900GB) - pretty much empty

These drives were created when I had a C drive failure as reported by the Bios - I did a system image backup and restored the system image to the new 2TB Seagate drive and the result was the setup above.

I also have the following installed:

G Drive - 2 TB gaming drive - Steam and about 100+ games installed - origin - etc - no relation to drives above
H Drive - Crucial 960 GB solid state drive - formatted NTFS and empty - SATA internal connection via ICY DOCK
I Drive - 3 TB external USB 3.0 drive for backups

All drives are internal SATA drives except the USB 3.0 drive - also have an external hot swap SATA dock - turned off

I created a windows backup of the C drive to the I drive and then attempted to restore it to the 960 solid state drive but it did not seem to put the files and folders where they had been on the C drive - user error? - the windows restore process is very limited in scope and I was guessing as to how to restore.

I then attempted to do a system image of the C drive to the I drive but this seem to fail almost as soon as it began - I rebooted but have not tried again assuming I screwed something up during my previous restore attempts.

My ultimate goal is to clone the C partition to the solid state drive and boot off of it. Somehow disable the current C drive but still have the D drive as it was before - even possibly removing the C,D,F combo and setting it aside as a backup boot drive. Yes I would be willing to replace the D,F drive with another drive - back both up to the I drive and then restore to a new drive after the Solid state drive is booting.

but back to the SSD drive and getting it cloned and booting- any suggestions on reliable software or methods would be greatly appreciated.

or should I just put the page file on the SSD - set it up for ready boost and move my Steam Games over to it. - I don't know - just dreamed of booting my machine fast instead of the usual wait.

 

[bigmck]

You don't say how big the SSD is, but your C: drive is 400 GB. That would mean the SSD would need to be that big and I doubt if it is since that would be a very expensive SSD. If you have a 120 GB SSD then your C: drive needs to be smaller than 120 GB to restore to the SSD. A good imaging software is Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download but you need the C: drive partition to be smaller than the SSD.

 

[Banzer]

As stated above the SSD is 960 GB, just as a side note - the image backup failed again on the USB 3.0 drive but when I plugged in a hot swap 1 TB SATA drive the image backup worked perfectly. - must have something to do with USB 3.0. It does function well for regular backups which I will schedule on a weekly basis.

 

[pabuman]

In my opinion, why don't you migrate OS to ssd? If you insist on cloning, I will recommend you a free backup tool-Aomei Backupper.
That's what I could help you.