I have a bigger SSD and want to clone the existing tiny one onto it. SImple enough sounding task: 2 partitions, one of which is recovery and is tiny (500MB or so) and the rest is the W10 system.

That’s fine, acronis seems to think it can do this but when I start the wizard it offers the W10 bit as having a max size equivalent to the size of the old partition while the recover patition can be resized to fill the remainder of the new disc. ALternatively, I can set the recovery bit to be smaller but the software then leaves the rest as “unallocated space” and still won’t allow me to expand the W10 bit.

All sounds bloody silly to me – how can I make this W10 section take up almost the entirety of the drive ?

or is acronis shit ?

how about clonezilla ?
(useable by a numpty ?)

Seems a bit bizarre, I like acronis, & it usually does all I need. Clone using acronis & then re-size within windows disc manager?

Clone it, leave the partition sizes as they are, don’t resize anything. Resize in Windows after the cloning. (I can talk you through it.)

Pro tip: if you’re using a USB caddy and want it to work, put the source drive in the caddy and the new destination drive in the machine before you start. It will surely bollocks up in some ephemeral way the other way around. You can thank me later, I lost days to that little embuggerance.

Ta,

I know about windows “disk management” – is that what you both mean ?

put the source drive in the caddy and the new destination drive in the machine before you start

Source drive is my windows system – are you saying I need to attach the caddy to a second PC and take out this PCs system drive ?

I know about windows “disk management” – is that what you both mean ?

I’d use DISKPART at a command line, I’ve had way more reliable results that way.

Source drive is my windows system – are you saying I need to attach the caddy to a second PC and take out this PCs system drive ?

Back up a ways, how are you cloning?

Point is, your new drive should be in situ where it’s going to live before you clone. So, don’t clone and then swap, swap and then clone.

Ah, wait, I think I’m on the same page; are you running Acronis from within the running system? Build a rescue CD and boot from that instead.

Ah, wait, are you running Acronis from the running system?

good lord, no – who’d be so stupid as to try that ?
(ahem 😳 )

Build a rescue CD and boot from that instead

oh OK – not something I’ll be doing any time very soon but I’m sure I can. (given this is also how clonezilla works, which would you pick?)

This isn’t the 10 minute job I’d envisaged, is it ?

I missed this,

or is acronis shit ?

I’ve been using disk cloning tools since Norton Ghost on a DOS boot floppy, and time and again the Acronis range has succeeded where others have failed. I can think of none better.

(given this is also how clonezilla works, which would you pick?)

Having done this as recently as last week, I’d go Acronis. Clonezilla is good, but Acronis is better IMHO.

This isn’t the 10 minute job I’d envisaged, is it ?

It’s not so bad. It’s the PC equivalent of “measure twice, cut once.” Took about 40 minutes to do my drive once I’d stopped cocking about with inferior tools.

Fine, I’ll set aside a whole day then !

(only ever used diskpart in dos “outside” of windows (before system loads up) – can I run it within windows from cmd ?

Yup.

Time was it was the only way to resize a system partition.

Thusly on my laptop (no final output because I’ve nowhere to extend to):

C:\>diskpart

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          111 GB      0 B
  Disk 1    Online          298 GB  1024 KB
  Disk 2    Online           14 GB    12 GB

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary            100 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Primary            111 GB   101 MB
  Partition 3    Recovery           449 MB   111 GB

DISKPART> select partition 2

Partition 2 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> extend

Disk 0 is my boot SSD, disk 1 the mechanical HDD and disk 2 an SD card.

On the SSD, partition 0 is the Windows boot partition, 1 is the main Windows partition (ie, the C:\ drive) and 2 is the slack space used by the SSD manager to reduce wear.

In all of these cases you can broadly identify what they are by size.

OK, ta – I’ll give it a go then.

Worry about that after it’s cloned and booting.

The diskpart bit takes no time at all, it’s literally instant; way better than trying to dynamically recalculate things on the fly when cloning.

Worry about that after it’s cloned and booting

worry about what ?

(… and I assume offset is something that’ll be set on my behalf, rather than me buggering it up by inventing a number ?)

Try Macrium reflect (FREE)…make sure you delete the little block between the patritions then merge them. Thats whatI did last week and worked fine

worry about what ?

Resizing.

(… and I assume offset is something that’ll be set on my behalf, rather than me buggering it up by inventing a number ?)

Tick the box in Acronis that mentions SSDs when you duplicate and it should sort that out. Not something you need to worry about.