Help with cloning hard drive

[Nightrider]

Newbie.

I have W7 Ult. in my laptop (Intel i3 processor) and I attempted to use Macrium for Cloning to a larger HDD. I do not want to IMAGE or BACKUP. Just CLONE old to the new. Here is the problem:

1. The old disk, with OS and all the apps, the original one is Dynamic Volume.
2. The new disk, the target disk, came formatted to Basic MBR. Of course I could change that to Dynamic in short order within Windows.

Macrium Reflect will not even recognize the connected old disk inside the computer. It presents me with the new disk as the "source" disk.

Additionally, assuming that Macrium will recognize both disks and successfully clone one to the other, should I be connecting the new drive to the USB, do the cloning and then install it inside the computer?

Any guidance will be appreciated.

[Pierre2]

Due to the limitation of Windows Disk Management, you cannot convert dynamic disk to basic disk without data loss.
Thus It is requires to delete all volumes on dynamic disk so that you can convert it to basic disk by Disk Management.

In Windows, it is easy to the conversion of basic disk to dynamic disk,
but convert dynamic disk to basic disk very annoying.
- There are the three ways to complete this work for you.

- Convert to basic disk via deleting all volumes on the dynamic disk.
- Convert to basic disk via using Partition Recovery Software.
- Convert to basic disk by using Commercial Disk Converters.

[Remah]

Macrium Reflect Free Edition does restore to the same hardware (Macrium Restore) but does not support cloning to different hardware (Macrium Redeploy).

The paid version has redeploy and direct cloning without saving an image:

ReDeploy
Restore your Windows operating systems to dissimilar hardware using ReDeploy which features a clean, simple and intuitive user interface.

Direct disk cloning
Directly copy one hard disk to another without creating an image file first. Partitions can be ordered and resized during this process

[Pierre2]

Direct disk cloning
Directly copy one hard disk to another without creating an image file first.
- Partitions can be ordered and resized during this process

won't Gparted do that as well?.

[Remah]

Originally Posted by Remah

Macrium Reflect Free Edition does restore to the same hardware (Macrium Restore) but does not support cloning to different hardware (Macrium Redeploy).

The paid version has redeploy and direct cloning without saving an image:

I forgot to add that Macrium Reflect Free has no dynamic volume support either. Again, you have to use the paid versions. That's why the dynamic volume doesn't appear.

Originally Posted by Pierre2

won't Gparted do that as well?.

The limitations of Macrium Reflect Free make it better for backup imaging and not so good for cloning drive to drive. Other free programs will do a redeployment of Windows boot drives but there are usually limitations working with dynamic volumes so you will have to check each product's features to be sure:
AOMEI Backupper
EaseUS ToDo Backup
DriveImageXL
GParted used to take multiple steps with some risk of having to reactivate Windows due to moving to a different disk drive.
CloneZilla clones disk to disk but may not work with dynamic volumes.
etc