New "migrate OS to SSD/HD" function in Partition Wizard 9

[dsperber]

I was just doing some exploration of the latest Partition Wizard 9 that I recently upgraded to. I pay for the Professional version even though I really have no need for its additional features and could live with the free version, just as a way of supporting the vendor for this superb product.

Anyway, I noticed that there is a new "migrate OS to SSD/HD" function now present (via wizard) in all versions of PW (including the free version).

As with everything in PW, this new function seems infinitely easy to use, and is available while running currently operational Windows to prepare the new SSD/HD for becoming the new bootable drive. Both "active" boot partition and also "system" (C) partition are copied to the target drive, arranged exactly as you want and re-sized exactly as you want (and of course aligned as they should be for optimal SSD performance if that's the target drive type).

Of course you do still need to then re-boot and get to BIOS setup in order to change the boot sequence so as to boot from the new SSD/HD instead of from the current boot drive.

There are numerous other similar utilities available from other vendors and from the SSD hardware manufacturers, to accomplish a similar result. But as with everything from PW, this one looks wonderfully simple and flexible, and intuitive. I'm going to use it next week when I add a new SSD to my new Lenovo M93p desktop machine, and re-purpose the factory spinner drive to "data".

 

[gregrocker]

I wonder if this isn't the same old Copy function that's always been on PW. There have been reports over the years that its been used to transfer the OS, but it wasn't thought to be as good as imaging.

It will be hard to beat Macrium's simplicity of just dragging the partition's to the target drive and having them auto-adjust to fit.

 

[dsperber]

This is definitely more than just a "copy" function for two partitions. It adds whatever is needed to ensure that booting from the new drive is successful, depending on the partitioning arrangement on the new drive.

As the illustrations and text show on their feature description page, in addition to the obvious copy of the boot and system partitions from Disk1 to Disk2 there are additional operations in the recipe:

"...including operations to update boot configuration/parameters and modify boot.ini. That is to say boot information will be fixed automatically during this process so that Windows on the target disk can be bootable."

 

[gregrocker]

They've really added imaging then. I wonder if it's good for other uses too.