Disk Cloning Question

A quickie? After many other things coming up the last couple weeks, I'm finally ready to clone my boot drive onto a 2nd SSD. A bit later, my plan is to acquire an "industrial" reliability Samsung NVMe SSD and replace the used Micron NVMe drive now housing my boot disk. I have Macrium Reflect Free Edition installed and running, and basically just poked around a bit to brush up - it's been a little while since I've cloned a drive / disk.

Do I need to bring over all 4 partitions from Disk 3 to disk 2? In particular, partition 2 is not formatted, so, I'm not sure what it is there for or if it is needed.

I suppose "KISS" could be thought of as applying both ways (do or don't clone disk 3, partition 2).

Note: This "new" computer has been in light use for several months, and heavier use more recently, as it is now my primary desktop machine. The OS is Win 11 Pro. ((My old Win 10 Prop machine is most likely going to become my "learn Linux" machine, as 11 Pro is pushing me past my tolerance for several things... But, for now, I need to keep a quick 11 Pro machine going too.)

The other free tool you need to have in your collection is Minitool Partition Wizard, It is easier to work with than Disk Management Tools in Windows. You will see instantly which partitions have drive letters assigned to them.

https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

The other thing that you might not be aware of is that Grok will not only tell you how to do this type of stuff, it will actually write code in just about any computer language to help with various tasks.

https://grok.com/

Noted. I didn’t have any problem seeing the names of any partitions that had drive letters assigned to them, using the Disk Management Tools in Windows, but Minitool Partition Wizard sounds like it would be useful to acquire. I’m all for
“easier to work with” than most Windows tools. ;-)

I prolly should try Grok too, tho’ then we’d likely have less of these interesting threads that sometimes veer off into other interesting areas. I do note that Brave searches increasingly turn up commands and command sequences, as well as instructions (sometimes of varying helpfulness), so I wonder if it is gradually heading in that sort of “Grok-like” direction. Not just in this area, in some ways, Brave searches seem better now, than Google.

I hadn’t used any of these AI Chatbots until about 6 months ago at the urging of another Freeper who is a bonafide genius and now retired programming professional. His knowledge is light years ahead of my own. He often gives me mentoring to help with my computer projects.

If you have a Samsung phone, they are a major player in the Perplexity AI service and will give you a year of “Pro” service for free. https://www.perplexity.ai/ I forget the steps that you need to take off the top of my head. You can choose from a number of models and ask them questions all day for no fee with the Pro service. I used to get myself booted off of both ChatGPT and Grok for hours at a time for asking too many questions.

They have both the GPT-5 model which is ChatGPT and the Grok 4 with reasoning model which is Grok. By default, they save your conversations that it can refer back to them and give you a more appropriate answer. This raises privacy and security issues which is one of the reasons that I purchased my most recent mini-PC which will be used for hosting open-source AI models locally, which translates into incredible versatility, better speed, and better security and privacy for chat. content creation and learning about the nuts and bolts of AI.

The current push for AI PCs is mostly hype and few consumers have any idea how to take advantage of their neural processors. But there are more and more content creation applications that are starting to utilize them. The problem is that with the rapid pace of development in this area, the AI laptop, desktop, or mini-PC you buy today will likely be old news in a year or so.

I spent quite a bit of money fooling around on AI creation sites to produce silly things like the content in these pages, https://gizmotips.com/ and https://teddycat.fun/

With a local AI web server you can waste money on hardware instead and get the same type of results.

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