New
#500
Macrium will do all of that with an image restore to a new drive, formatted or not..
Well as MJF suggested it might be a dud mate try checking it with a tester of some description try this one Alex Intelligent Software - Downloads
Thank you for your answer, whs.
What setup would you use if the laptop in question had no CD/DVD writer/player?
Not really sure I understand your question. But you have to make an image to an external disk and then pull the image back in with the WinPE CD. You can burn the WinPE CD from the .iso that I have uploaded to this Skydrive site.
You may also make a bootable USB flash stick with WinPE on it. I use YUMI. YUMI - Multiboot USB Creator (Windows) | USB Pen Drive Linux
Thank you for your answers. What I meant, whs, is that this laptop has no CD/DVD drive built in, and I also do not have an external one for it. That is why Britten30 made a suggestion of a bootable USB.
However, as the case was I had purchased a Samsung 840 SSD, and it included some cloning software by the name of Clonix. It worked cleanly, first time. I used a diginote external USB 3 enclosure for the SSD. Beforehand I shrunk the C: partition on the HDD to 100GB using [the free] PartitionWizard Home Edition so that it would easily fit on the SSD. I turned off virtual memory so the page file did not have to be cloned. I checked that the disk was being access using an AHCI driver. I also defragmented the HDD.
Now I'll use the data partition of the external HDD for backups.
The only tweaks I've made so far afterwards is to turn off defragmenting, disable the disk caches in my browsers, and to check that TRIM is enabled in the OS.
One more thing you can do is to get rid of the hiberfile. The command is powercfg -h off. You should set the pagefile to 1 or 2GBs
I am moving my OS from a 3TB HD to a 480GB SSD. I bought the Paragon Migrate software and migrated about 370 GB to the SSD. I am not clear on how to proceed. The new SSD appears on my Disk Management without a drive letter. I want to end up with the SSD as the boot drive and I now I need to chage that in the BIOS when I reboot, but how/when do I change drive letters. Do I add a drive letter for the SSD in disk management now? Before I reboot and change the bios boot order. It may be obvious but I'm at that cross road and would like to make sure I do it correctly so I don't screw up the system! Attachments of the disk management window and the completed message from Paragon Migrate. After this I plan to delete all data on the C: drive and place it into a RAID with my D: drive.
Looks like your OS and your system partition were transferred to Disk2. That's the one you should set as first boot device in the BIOS.