Help to clone OS drive

I haven't ever had luck cloning a drive and the last time I tried SSD's weren't even a thing yet.

I recently recovered from a very badly corrupted Operating System NVME drive. After doing a Cloud Reinstallation everything is fine again but SeaTools lists the drive as 77% health and passes all the tests. I still do not trust it.

I'm using a 500gb NVME and will soon have a replacement 500gb Crucial NVME.

Googling doesn't make me feel very confident and I'm hoping there's some free software or maybe there's a program within Windows 11 that can do it?

Please friends, what do I do?

There are many imaging tools, and you can clone from many of them.

How you do it depends on how your pc is set up e.g. does it only have 1 NVME slot or 2?

Also do you have an external usb hard drive?

How much data do you have on existing drive?

As an aside, I would recommend buying a 1TB drive as a minimum these days

I never clone. I restore an image. During the image restore, my imaging software will not only initialize a new drive, but I do not hsve to format it either. It willl also allow me to resize and reorder partitions if I am restoring to a larger drive. If the new drive is same size as old just drag each partition from source drive onto the new drive during the restore process.

I use paid imaging software myself, but I believe Haselo Backup Suite Free will do this as well. It will also clone.
I've never used Hasleo to restore so I can not give exact instructions but here is what AI says.

Yes, with Haselo Backup Suite you can restore a system image to a larger drive. During the restore process, Hasleo offers the option to expand your existing OS partition from a smaller partition on the original disk to a larger one on the new drive.

Here's a more detailed explanation and the process:


How to Restore to a Larger Drive with Hasleo Backup Suite:

1. Choose a System Image: In the Hasleo Backup Suite interface, navigate to the "Home" section and select the system image you want to restore.
   
2. Initiate Restore: Click on "Actions" and then choose "Restore".
   
3. Select Target Disk: Follow the prompts, and Hasleo will guide you to select the larger target disk where you want to restore the image.
   
4. Partition Geometry: Hasleo will provide an opportunity to adjust the partition geometry, allowing you to expand the OS partition to utilize the full available space of the larger drive.
   
5. Start Restore: Once you've configured the partition geometry, proceed with the restoration process.
   
6. Post Restore: After the restore is complete, shutdown the pc to boot into the new drive

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Cloning is easy. Cloning is especially easy with MiniTool Partition Wizard (paid). I realize people like their freeware (which really isn't free) but sometimes biting the bullet is the wisest option. At some point I'll try Hasleo just for curiosity's sake but I've never had a failed clone with MiniTool. I highly recommend cloning an operating system once the user has it working to a satisfactory level. This means that all updates are current, a complete virus scan has been completed, and the unwanted clutter has been removed. In other words, get your OS running ship shape as you want it before you clone it.

A clone of an operating system should be predominantly made for emergency purposes. Once it has been made either drive can be disconnected (you won't be able to run both on the same CPU) and tucked away in a cool, dark, dry place where it won't be completely forgotten. Labelling the drive "clone of ___" or "original__" is advisable. Clones can also be a quick way to see if failure to boot is due to a hardware issue or a software issue. Simply by plugging the copy back into your system after removing the troublesome drive can indicate if the problem is originating in your hardware (still doesn't boot) or if it is simply your software (PC sees the drive but reports nothing wrong). This is where having an external enclosure can be especially handy because you can put the troublesome drive in the external enclosure to see if it can be read.

I highly advise keeping a clone of every operating system of importance. SSD's are relatively inexpensive and cloning an operating system to a solid state drive takes little time if it's under 1TB these days. Even for those who prefer NVMe a good copy can always be cloned back to the NVMe from an SSD. Is there a risk of data corruption? A: Always. But then, every time a restoration is made there is an equal risk of data corruption so the risk is relative. There's always a risk of data corruption whenever files are being transferred or copied no matter what sort of backup one might resort to using. Fortunately there are tools available to ensure data integrity and they will work on a clone just as easily as they will work on a fresh Windows install.

Cloning can have one problem, it clones/copies everything, from empty spaces to deleted but not overwritten or erased data as well as corrupted but readable data. That has advantage of salvaging data without risk to originals. It's also 1:1 in size of original so it will not copy on smaller disk or will leave unusable space on new disk. Backup to restore has disadvantage of needing extra storage to keep the data until restored but has several advantages. When you backup it all goes in one file, only actual accessible data is backed up and even that can be compressed in various compression format and can be much smaller (30-50%) than sum of data in original disk, therefore needing less temporary storage. With it you can also choose which partition to back up and which not. A good backup program like MR or Hasleo can also expand main/OS partition to whole disk automatically so no space is wasted or having to do it manually. The backup file could (and should) be kept for further backup using Differential or Incremental backups that are much smaller than original and so save a lot of work and data.