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i had a bad experience with one of the free cloning products - pretty sure it was easeus- , so I've reverted to only using windows tools fro hard drive swap outs.
What happened was that i cloned an existing C drive onto a fresh partition of a quieter + larger drive , using easeus, & it seemed ok at first - the initial boot failed but windows offered to fix that by re-writing some boot sector, & it then booted up fine - but then the PC could not recognize mouse, keyboard , external drives etc when they were connected to different USB ports
The clone process had somehow completely messed up the USB drivers. I spent some time partially fixing it by comparing & retrieving drivers from another PC, but then decided I did not really want to trust the clone, & put the original noisier drive back in.
I am taking an interest in all of this because I had a data drive die unexpectedly recently. A WD caviar green 1TB just went from 100% OK to 100% dead.-
Luckily I had enough redundancy to recover from that as it mostly held backups. My local google drive was on there, so it was lost but that restored OK from cloud.
It only take one such "surprise" to get you thinking - how safe are my other drives & data!
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