Best way to clone a data drive (smaller HDD to bigger one)?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Hi all, they’re both Western Digital drives, so I can use the WD-licensed Acronis True Image utility, I suppose, but I’m wondering if that’s the best one? I think I want to just create one volume on the bigger drive unless there’s a good reason not to. I already have too many partitions on other physical drives I’ll be moving from this mobo/CPU to the other newer one. I’ll be doing the cloning in the newer machine under Windows 10.

The drive to be cloned is an OOOLD (minimum 5 years, probably more) Caviar Blue 640GB (just under 600 actually formatted) and I’m going to a 2TB Caviar Black. Both are 7200 RPM. The new one will be used under Windows 10, the old one has run under XP and 7.

One complicating factor may be (is?) that I have the Steam client and my original Steam Library on the drive under the Program Files folder (the name of the folder implying that it dates from the 32 bit WinXP days, right?).

I’ll clearly have to at least re-install the client in Windows 10, but maybe I can just point Steam to the folder, and any Steam libraries on other drives?

2

Just use the free copy you got with your HD. Your Acronis will have the option to automatically fill the remainder of the space with the partition.

To repartition use this, the only nagware/adware/upselling-free tool that I found when I went through 6 different ones recently: http://www.disk-partition.com/free-partition-manager.html

3

Thanks for the reply. The last time I looked into this the Gnu Partition Live Editor (aka GPartEd Live) was the go-to free partition editor, and if you boot from it it lets you dynamically resize partitions, but it’s good to know there’s something else out there.