best way to clone a SSD to a Bigger SSD?

Jet-Fighter7700

Jet-Fighter7700

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So Doing another upgrade project , getting a bunch of SSD's and needing to upgrade them to bigger SSD's,

problem is last time I used acronis live disk, and it worked quite well,

but things have moved on, and I need to find a better way of doing it, in 2024,

I understand there is now GPT style and MBR style, and there is a process of converting it?
then there is bitlocker, this needs to be backed up or turned off before you do it, correct?

then there is secure boot/and AHCI mode/Raid mode,
all of this is quite confusing, so I thought to ask here.

firstly, best program to do straight cloning/ OS (win 10/11) everything?
and secondly, what settings to put in to the laptop to get it to see the drives and let me clone, Lappy is a Latitude 3520


I figured out the 1st bit, secure boot mode off/ AHCI mode enable, but not sure if there is something else I need to do in the BIOS?
as when I use my trusty Acronis, it shows my Source/Destination disks as I expect, but there is a X on Source saying Bitlocker is enabled,
when it isnt, what am I missing here? must I convert to MBR first? or what else?

or is there another program I should be loading into the O/S and using to do cloning with?
suggestions?
 
I used Macrium Reflect as well to migrate using a 30 day trial. Was dead easy.

A lot of the other free software I found was hardware vendor locked.
 
Cloning from small to large is generally never a problem if the partition type is extendible. In my experience Linux partitions (or maybe just Linux cloning software who knows the stuff is still downright primitive for some reason) never properly clone from large to small. For NTFS you are more likely to manage as long as you remember defrag everything if it's a spinning disk.... though either way it might be best to first resize the partitions down to the size of the target disk before any kind of cloning just to be sure and even though macrium can do it never do a clone on a live system.

Of course there is a difference in methodology, in Linux you can merely shift around or copy partitions using the regular partitioning tools so maybe no one really sees the point in cloning per se and it's more of a windows thing.

You cannot convert GPT to MBR without a full format but Windows will happily do it the other way around for you at a moments notice the scaly buggers.... for UEFI either is fine but the system will only boot from GPT with legacy boot the same being true in reverse.... GPT is only actually necessary for partitions larger than 2TB I think.

TLDR: best way to know is to experiment but generally macrium will do everything for you.... just make sure to run a chkdsk afterwards. SecureBoot is a massive PITA and I have never used it.... or UEFI.... and no one can make me.
 
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