You can always try Carbon Copy Cloner as the drives don't have to be the same size for that to work. You would just need to install Clover to the EFI partition of the cloned drive as well as required kexts etc.
Thanks for the hint. I'm aware of that method, but trying to avoid it since it's not a proper clone cause you have to modify it for it to work. I've always used Clonezilla since it does a proper clone of the disk and wondered why people don't use it when it seems the only free software that does it simply and perfectly. Well, possibly because it can't clone/restore on a larger disk properly nor nowadays afaik doesn't support apfs.
Currently trying to see whether Crucials Acronis version would do it (and trying to get a portable w10 usb going for this, ugh
). If not, i guess i'm left with trying the CCC method.
----
Update:
I got the Win10 usb stick working (did it on another windows 10 pc) and seems that Acronis True Image for Crucial is doing it right. Still have to test it though, will report back. The software apparently only requires you have at least one Crucial drive connected to use it and seems to have pretty good functionalities (as my experience earlier with a WD edition of Acronis True Image) so this is definitely a viable option since it's free (given
you have at least one Crucial drive at hand). You can also build a rescue media with this so you don't have to have a Windows install afterwards necessarily.
---
Update2: It completed it successfully and after that i was able to normally boot from the clone. Pleasantly fast after that old hdd, ahh. There was one weirdness though: the second time i restarted i got the dreaded prohibited symbol. That might have had something to do with the pc for some reason loading the post screen twice, dunno. Or the fact i've had to do all kinds of weird **** the whole day to get this done
. I've had that prohibited symbol with another hack every now and then and have no clue what it's about. But now it seems fine and i'll try upgrading to Mojave now on the Sierra SSD.
---
Update3:
Scratch the success story. While it was bootable and worked normally, it didn't extend the machd volume to match the larger drive. And also like ATI 2017 it left a Microsoft reserved partition on the drive. So my faith in Acronis is almost completely shattered (i've used it in the past on windows). But because i'm a psycho, i'm still trying one thing, Acronis 2020, to see whether that makes a difference. After that it'll probably be CCC + install clover + copy efi.
I'll get me coat and leave this here. And thanks anyway trs96 for the work you've done on this method.
