My new Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SDD 2.5" drive should arrive
by Thursday.

In the past, I have generally either cloned a same-size hdd to
another hdd or used images.

But what is the procedure y'all would recommend for cloning an
HDD that has two partions (C and H) to a larger SSD?

The original system is XP.

I'm reading that perhaps Macrium Reflect 8 could do it.

Another product called AOMEI claims to do the same, but
expanding a partition requires a pay version of the program.
But it sounds to be the easiest to use.

But there are caveats in both wrt to "bootable" partitions.

What experiences have y'all had doing this? And what tools
have you used for cloning an XP OS?

I'm somewhat familiar with some linux rescue disk software that
I could probably use for prepping the destination SSD prior to
the cloning. But I would rather like to stick to one tool that
can do all necessary steps.


--- OpenXP 5.0.51
* Origin: (2:221/1.58)

My new Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SDD 2.5" drive should arrive
by Thursday.

Ooops. I meant that my SATA/USB cable will arrive on Thursday.
Then, I'll be able to begin the cloning process.


--- OpenXP 5.0.51
* Origin: (2:221/1.58)

Hello Arelor!

** On Wednesday 11.01.23 - 13:52, you wrote to me:

It's off to a bad start. :(

https://kolico.ca/tmp/ccc.jpg

Now what?

Well, the disk is having a bad day and nearing demise.

CHKDSK only reported a total of 14KB of "bad". I doubt that
it's an indication of growing doom.

I'd copy the disk over using dd_rescue (which skips bad
sectors) and then run some filesystem check utility on the
transfered filesystems in the destination drive. YOu may
find some file resided in a damaged sector and it is lost
or damaged, though.

I did it another way. I had a friend on Telegram who aided me
in using dd. Apparently, dd performs a byte-by-byte copy.

The end result maintained the "bad" areas, but at only 14KB,
I'm not worried about space implications on a 1TB SSD. :D

This is the whole story:

I tried Macrium, but I failed to understand where to look to
create the boot version. I did not realize that it was laying
under "Other Tasks". I also did NOT like how Macrium seemed to
hijack the pc by remaining resident in memory after killing its
processes manually; it simply kept reloading on its own! And
then there was the blasted "30 day Trial" bubble that kept
popping up on the task bar at random intervals.

Anyway, the whole Macrium process is now moot. I uninstalled it
when I noticed that it preferred to be always running at bootup
and in memory as a couple of processes and popping up with the
"30 day Trial.." bubble on my taskbar.

I did the migration with Clonezilla's Partclone thru the
default (novice) settings with the "auto expand partions
proportionally".

It failed to do my C partion after it encountered some bad
blocks, but it proceeded with H successfully.

Then.. with the help of a friend live on Telegram, I got help
with using the plain old "dd" command from the command line
boot to do a byte by byte copy of the C partition.

Then.. it was a simple matter to use the ntfsresize command to
get the original 35GB C partion to expand to the already
allocated 139GB space that was established when I selected the
"expand proportionally" option when I ran clonezilla.

Then, upon installing the SSD into the T60, Windows did NOT
originally report the C partition as the expanded size of
139GB, but another linux (debian) boot to the command line with
the Clonezilla program, and running ntfsresize -f -b /dev/sda1
FIXED the problem. That process automatically scheduled a
Windows chkdsk at the next reboot, and *then* I got the
official 139GB size of the C partition.

I have decided not to recover the few small sectors that are
still marked bad. The bad sectors aren't really real now that
I have migrated C onto the SSD.

In other research, I was reading that ntfstruncate is the
better tool to recover the marked bad sectors on my newly
migrated C partition on the SSD since there are no bad memory
locations on a new SSD. But chkdsk's report that they only
total up to 14KB, I'm not going to fuss over that.

This whole process was quite a journey.

I *don't* really notice a SIGNIFICANTLY faster boot time in XP,
but [1] maybe coming out of hibernate, the system loads a bit
faster, [2] the fan is running at a slower speed, and [3] there
is NO fan-speed test at boot up on my T60, [4] some web
browsing performance is a tad smoother and faster as the cache
previous content gets reused, I guess.


--../|ug




--
../|ug

--- OpenXP 5.0.51
* Origin: (2:221/1.58)

This whole process was quite a journey.

I *don't* really notice a SIGNIFICANTLY faster boot time in XP,
but [1] maybe coming out of hibernate, the system loads a bit
faster, [2] the fan is running at a slower speed, and [3] there
is NO fan-speed test at boot up on my T60, [4] some web
browsing performance is a tad smoother and faster as the cache
previous content gets reused, I guess.

There was just one surprise that frustrated me for a little
while.

When I booted with the SSD in place, [1] many desktop icons
lost their associations. Consequently, [2] the same programs
could not find their installation locations.

The origianl HDD was divided as C and H. Since C was a piddly
35GB maximum size (and getting used up pretty fast) and H was
the remaining 200GB, I had gotten into the habit of installing
future programs on H over the years.

But the SSD process created an E partition in place of the H
partition.

I could simply go through all the shortcuts and change E to H,
and the associations. That worked on a couple of them. But I
still remained discouraged since I had numerous programs and
references to H in various places! Even my Tables in MS Access
had numerous references to H, and I was *not* interested in
reprogramming those in my various databases!

I was still discouraged when I learned that XP did not support
an ASSIGN command!

However.. after calming down, and having a look at the
partitions with XP's Disk Management tool, I realized that all
I had to do was right-click over the E partition, and it
provided the option to change the letter.

--
../|ug

--- OpenXP 5.0.51
* Origin: (2:221/1.58)