Was faced recently with the task of needing to clone my OS drive contents to a larger drive. In my case from a 500GB Nvme drive to a 1TB. First scenario in a PC environment and later on a MAC.
TLDR
First thing I reached after was the good old HBCD USB stick, but none of the software packages could do what I needed. Either they lacked the feature or the feature was not included in the free version of the software. Disappointed but determined, after a bit of research on the matter, ended up trying Acronis True Image and AOMEI Backupper and Partition Assistant. The first one asked for money up font and the second had the desired features in their free software package but got greedy and after some rise in popularity, put the feature behind a paywall, obviously.
Since I'm not going to use this often enough to justify any other price than free, I dug deeper and found DiskGenius.
As of writing this the software is free and it comes with tons of features. I'd suggest a download and storage in a software toolbox folder since this might change and go the way of AOMEI.
With DIskGenius, I successfully cloned my Windows 10 operating system drive contents, to a new, larger drive. It handled the repartitioning too. No hair loss, no boot issues or anything. I'll probably never use this software again in the next 5-10 years so I'm not going to pay 40-50 dollars thank you. Noteworthy info that I bumped into is that it might be worth trying to change the partition style of both drives (target and source), so that they match. So if one is MBR (Master Boot Record) and the other is GPT (GUID Partition Table), you should try converting both to GPT. The latter being the more modern one btw. This was a surprise for me. Back in my day... :) we all used MBR (and floppy disks. Look it up). Anyways here is a comparison if you are interested in the differences.
Overcoming the task on PC, began unpacking my screwdrivers to begin operating on my MAC. Long story short, to my surprise Apple really does go out of their way to make things as hard as possible. As if the several different types of screws, glued in, soldered parts were not enough. The nvme ssd in there is also a "special" type. Not standard, beacuse why would it be?! Go figure, so the short, simple and free task of finding a cloning software solution and using a spare, larger capacity hardware I had laying around to do a bit of an upgrade turned into a complicated, long and added expense pain in the ass task. Thank you Apple.
Not to bore you, the software on Mac I used is SuperDuper! It is not only superduper but it is also free. Ordered one of these OWC Aura Pro X2 drives. People seemed to be fond of them. Claimed that these are faster compared to the regular ssd drives these units were shipped with. While at it I also ordered a replacement speaker set from Amazon, cuz' my left speaker started to have some undesireable, unique "features" (crunchy, rattling playback sound). Was using the laptop for months with sound output balance all the way to the right. Two birds one stone. The upgrade and cloning was sucessfull. The new speaker is duller compared to the original one but the OWC ssd does not dissapoint.
Now I have a pretty decent typewriter again. Can't wait to see what breaks next and how much it will cost. At this point I can't sell this mac at a price that would be worth it so I guess I'm stuck with it forever. The love hate relationship continues as if being married was not enough :P.
Cheers!
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