In reply to a post by Banger:

Macrium Reflect free for imaging. Youre mixing up terms. Imaging for backup, cloning for disk to disk transfer.

Reflect can do both, i used it to clone my own SSD onto another SSD, just a shame it all went pear shape last night for some reason, but that is nothing to do with the cloning. i also used it on Saturday to clone a drive for a work colleague and it work fine.

once i get this machine back up and running as it should be I will be using Reflect to make image back up.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

I've always used Paragon's utilities for partitioning, image backups, and cloning and they have never let me down yet. Free versions of their utilities for each of these uses is available.

I think many people have difficulties with newer versions of Windows because they do not appreciate that you really need to clone the whole disk (or at least the MBR and the hidden partition), not just the main Windows partition (normally C:). Failure to do so makes it difficult to restore to a bootable image.

Four partitions for UEFI for some reason, on windows 8.1 I have a recovery of NTFS 300MB, one that is fat32 100MB, which is UEFI, then a 128MB which is not formatted for some reason and then the 223GB NTFS main partition. So all of then would need to be cloned or copied to the image.

Now on a mates machine that just have a normal bios, Windows 8.1 only makes two partitions just like XP used to.

The drive in my laptop (Sony VAIO) has got 4 partitions - 2xrecovery (1.44GB & 34.87GB), 1xEFI (260MB) and Primary NTFS (894.23GB). There is unallocated space of 261MB. I cloned the disk to replicate this exactly but it didn't work and I wonder if the unallocated space is in fact being used in some way when the laptop boots.

For now I am using Windows File History to backup my files and documents to an external drive. I know that works as I can manually locate, copy and open files that are in the backup folder on the external drive. If push comes to shove I've got installation media for all the software I use.

for windows i recommend macrium, and there is a free version which is adequate for most people.