I use Acronis True Image 2015 for backing up and imaging . If I need to resize (beyond the basic functionality included in True Image) or convert partition types, I use EaseUS Partition Master . Both are commercial products and work very well, IMHO .

Thanks for the post darry. I downloaded both and EaseUS knew right out of the gate. That i had a usb adaptor plugged in with a scandisk 32gig SD card. That program worked perfect resizing the SD. Acronis True Image 2015 has the clone function (Unavalible in trail mode) so i wasn't able to test it.

However you solved my issue with EaseUS w/ their resizing function.

You rock!

script-fu wrote on 2020-10-13, 02:33:

Thanks for the post darry. I downloaded both and EaseUS knew right out of the gate. That i had a usb adaptor plugged in with a scandisk 32gig SD card. That program worked perfect resizing the SD. Acronis True Image 2015 has the clone function (Unavalible in trail mode) so i wasn't able to test it.

However you solved my issue with EaseUS w/ their resizing function.

You rock!

Happy to be of service .

I actually bought Partition Master 11.9 and Acronis True Image 2015 . I have been an Acronis user for something like 10 years. Clonezilla is free and nice, but just not as streamlined as True Image (i.e. too many knobs to twiddle for what should be simple tasks) .

Partition Master was an impulse buy and has been really useful in helping fix strangely corrupted Windows installs/partitions (i.e. Volume Shadow Copy Service craps out in strange ways, AFAICR) . The resizing functionality is very robust, IMHO .

If you aren't aware already, the reason why Win32DiskImager creates such a big filesize when imaging SD cards is because I believe it does a sector level clone, leading to the image being the same size as the card itself. I have never had an issue with this, it has always restored a good working image even on new cards. Also to note space isn't at a premium on my setup and I can tolerate 100 or so complete card images.

However, you need to be aware that some other tools may not correctly image the drive, I have had issues with other tools imaging the data partition but not the MBR for example. This is especially apparent with tools that treat the SD card as always non bootable, thus missing the MBR and bootsector.

Yes, Win32DiskImager makes a full 1:1 image, including the empty sectors, of course.
Zipping the image file greatly helps in reducing file size.. But it must be unzipped each time for actual use, of course. 😀

Edit: Also note that one 32GB card does not necessarily have exactly the same size as another one (a few bytes to megabytes difference).

That's why pre-made disk images (Raspbian ezc) are a little bit smaller than the targeted SD card size.

in order to clone one 32GB card to another, the image mustn't exceed the capacity of the target card.

So either use a bigger card or make sure the drive geometry of the source card is not matching the maximum capacity.

That's why using fake geometry is sometimes better than using the real LBA values. 😉

Happy to be of service .

I actually bought Partition Master 11.9 and Acronis True Image 2015 . I have been an Acronis user for something like 10 years. Clonezilla is free and nice, but just not as streamlined as True Image (i.e. too many knobs to twiddle for what should be simple tasks) .

Partition Master was an impulse buy and has been really useful in helping fix strangely corrupted Windows installs/partitions (i.e. Volume Shadow Copy Service craps out in strange ways, AFAICR) . The resizing functionality is very robust, IMHO .

Yep i should have bought partition master myself years ago when we we're resizing drives for arcade machines. It didn't dawn on me to try it with usb drives and was glad to see it. It is certainly the top dog as far as resizing partitions go on windows.

I downloaded clonezilla the other day for the first time which was a .iso file. That struck me funny thinking why would it be a .iso? It's still sitting on my desktop to investigate how useful it might be to me. I will get to it but distraction is ever prevalent here hence leaving it on the desktop.