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Cloning a 'foreign' SSD

The motherboard on my wife's computer has died. I have managed to get hold of what is supposed to be an identical computer. In theory, I should be able to just insert her drive into the replacement computer and everything should work. However, to be on the safe side, the ideal solution would be to clone her drive on to another drive using the True Image 2016 on my computer and then try the clone first.

The question is; can I add her old SSD and a spare SSD to my machine and then clone from SSD(1) to SSD(2) rather than from my system drive?

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Peter, welcome to these User Forums.

In principle, yes, you could do as you suggest by adding the two SSD drives to your computer and do the clone in that way, however, I would recommend using Backup & Restore in preference to using cloning, as that way you have a good backup of the source SSD plus the drive itself as protection against mistakes etc.

See forum topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this (written in response to the many problems caused by cloning going wrong!).

I have a dual-bay docking station (USB 3.0/2.0) that I use for these type of tasks, so I can connect drives externally to my computer then work on them for Backups, Recovery, Cloning etc.  Many of these dual bay docks can also perform a hardware clone operation without the need for a computer, and they are relatively inexpensive.

Peter, welcome to these user forums.

Steve has recommended a backup and restore as preferable to clone.  I also believe this is best way to proceed.  As a minimum, you should perform a "disk mode" backup using full partition list.  Then, if something goes wrong in the clone, you have a way to recover.

Also, ATI 2016 includes a "Universal Restore" capability.  Universal Restore is designed to restore a backup to a different computer with different hardware.  That way, if the "cloned" drive fails to boot, you could then try a Universal Restore.  

I strongly recommend downloading Steve's "How Not to Clone".  I also recommend downloading the ATI 2016 user guide and reading the paragraphs on Universal Restore.

Regards,

FtrPilot