The target disk can also be of any size with the same considerations as above. Acronis True Imageįor straight disk-cloning, Acronis True Image Home ($49.99) is another good possibility. It uses shadow-copy and so can also copy files that are in use. That means that the amount of used space on the HDD be smaller than the full size of the SSD, with a few gigabytes still left free as a security measure.Īnother solution to the size problem is to rather use a copying tool such as HoboCopy to copy from the HDD to the SSD. Paragon Backup & Recovery 2011 (Advanced) Free has 'Restore with Shrink' to restore a backup image into a smaller disk, taking into account only the amount of actual data of the image.

vhd's) but was not able to boot as some boot information were probably lost and could not be repaired using the Win7 installation DVD. I almost got there combining Windows image backup combined with Acronis True Image restore CD (which can load. Acronis Migrate Easy is a fully functional tria for 15 days but need both the HDD and SSD connected at the same time which is a bit of a problem for me as a laptop user. Therefore, I'm looking for a third party tool that will be able to:Īcronis True Image seems like a tool that should support this but it's a paid-for software and the trial version cannot create clones. For instance, I have about 50GB data, my new SSD is 80GB but I still can't use Windows clone/restore system if my HDD is something like 300GB. SSDs are usually much smaller than HDDs which complicates matters. Is there a free way to clone a full Windows 7 installation from HDD to SSD? (The free part is important, I know I can pay for Acronis True Image.)

Clone hdd to ssd acronis