Cloning hard drive to SSD - help needed to find where Windows resides

[Murmansk]

I am wanting to replace the hard disc in a desktop machine with a solid state drive in order to make the machine run a bit faster.

I have done this a couple of times before without any problem but this time I am having a few issues and I wondered if anyone might be able to shed some light on it for me

The SSD is 240 megabytes and the hard disc is roughly 1 terabyte. I am using Macrium Reflect free software to do the cloning. I have used this before but the results it is giving me when I analyse what is on the disc are slightly confusing and I have created a screenshot and attached it.

I am unsure as to whether the operating system is on the 800gb partition of the hard drive or whether it is on one of the smaller partitions which are shown on the screen shot. My first attempt at doing the cloning was unsuccessful because the software reported that there was not enough space on my SSD to receive what was going to go onto it and this was because I was including the 800 gigabyte partition in the process because I assumed windows to be on there. I had reduced the size of the data on there to a size which should have fitted on the SSD but I think the cloning software wants to copy the whole of the partition even though most of it is empty and therefore that explains why I'm getting the error message.

The hard disc is in a Dell machine which was on Windows 8 and has recently been updated to Windows 10, it also probably includes a recovery partition which is making it slightly more difficult to work out what is going on.

The bottom line is please could someone take a look at the screen shot and tell me where they think Windows 10 is living on the hard disk.

Thanks

[Graham.]

Windows is on the 800GB partition c: If you really want to check, boot up the machine and look in control panel - system - advanced - enviroment variables - windir

[Roger Mills]

Windows is in the 857GB partition, but only actually 80-odd GB of it.

If you want to clone it to a smaller SSD, you may have to reduce the partition size first. There are various partition managers which allow you to do this, and create an additional (empty) partition with the extra space.

[Nick]

I'm not a W10 expert, but assuming the same tools lurk as in previous versions you can just search and run cmd and type 'set' to find the windir variable contents and, assuming C: is a basic volume, run diskmgmt.msc from the cmd window and select, right click and shrink it to less than the size of the SSD.

[Johnny B Good]

The screenshot quite clearly indicates that the OS is on the 857GB 5th primary partition identified as OS(C). You'll have to shrink this partition by at least 631GiB to fit all 7 primary partitions onto a

240GiB SSD (or even more if the SSD is actually only 240GB - check its reported size in MR Free).

You can either shrink the partition (drive C) first, using whatever partition management software you have to hand that can handle GPT disks, or else on-the-fly during the cloning process if MR Free supports this feature.

Although win10 may offer a partition resizing option in its disk management control panel, it may be rather limited in its ability to shrink a disk volume. A proper 3rd party partition management tool may be the only way to do the job if MR Free doesn't include this facility.

I'm rather out of touch with what's on offer these days by way of GPT aware partition management software. The last time I needed to use such tools, it was with standard MBR disks using Paragon Hard Disk Manager 9.5 Special Edition that was one of the freebies on a PC Pro magazine cover CD some years ago now.

I imagine you'd prefer to find a free 'solution' to resizing GPT partitions rather than splash the cash. Unfortunately I can't offer any recommendations on free resizing tools since I don't know myself what can be trusted to do a proper job without resorting to running partition editing tools from a command line, so I'll be interested in any recommendations you may get.

Alternatively, if you're considering buying a partition editor capable of resizing that partition, you may as well consider upgrading your MR Free to the full product - it may be a cheaper option (just a guess - you might qualify for a discount, being a MR Free user).

HTH & GL!

[Murmansk]

Thanks for those replies, you've confirmed what I thought that Windows is on the 800gb partition and I need to shrink it.

I've already chopped 64gb off it so I'll have another go now

[Michael Chare]

A new downloaded copy of Windows 10 should just install and activate as the MS servers will know about your hardware.

[John Rumm]

I found that the MR free version does not seem to handle resizing on the fly with GPT discs that well (at least last time I tried it which was probably 6 months ago). I have had better success with Acronis 14... (Kingston offer a free version of that with some of their SSDs - if the OP needs one, I probably have one of their bundled licenses spare)

[dennis]

If you want to shrink and move partitions about then you can find some free software to do it here

I have used it to resize and move stuff about on win 10.

[T i m]

I use Gparted from most Live Linux DVD's (as I've got 100's of Linux DVD's kicking about). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

There are plenty of ways of doing as a two stage process. I was thinking more of utils that would resize while copying and leave the source partitions at their original size.

[T i m]

Sure, I was more replying to the 'If you want to shrink and move partitions about then you can find some free software to do it here' bit (so I could have snipped that last sentence). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Johnny B Good]

That's the main attraction of cloning tools that do this trick, no risk of the source disk being screwed by an errant resizing operation, the cloning software treats it as read only.

If the resized partition created on the target disk does happen to get screwed up, it's not a major tragedy, just a major inconvenience if it can't be fixed 'in-situ' with tools like "TestDisk" and suchlike.

One major thing to avoid when cloning to SSDs are mis-aligned partition spaces. You need to align their starting points on 1 or 2 MB boundaries so that not only are they 4K AF aligned, they're also aligned to the SSD's Erase Block boundary (EB's, iirc, can range in size from 64KB to 512KB and possibly right up to 1 or 2 MB - a 2MB boundary will guarantee this condition for all EB sizes right up the the 2MB limit even including the oldest models of SSD that may have used an EB size as small as 16KB).