Migrating Windows 10 to new SSD

I seem to remember using the free version of Macrium Reflect and it worked very well but then again on another occasion I tried the job with some other software and it was by no means as easy.

It helps if the new SSD is nice and big in relation to the old hard disk - probably easier to achieve now that SSD prices are lower than when I did it

I normally use one of the bundled versions of Acronis true image... they used to give away a copy with every HyperX SSD so I have loads of license keys. I will email you one... (assuming email is valid, but if not email me)

Doh! Should have looked closer at the box the (Crucial) SSD came in!

Links to support & Acronis software therein...

I feel such a fool...

Tim

Not in this case as there wasn?t any need for a huge HD. Anyway, sorted now after reading the instructions that came with the HD!

Tim

The last time I did this I used HDClone. The only faffabout is that HDClone needs to be burned onto a CD/DVD and you must be able to boot from that CD on the host computer.

Nick

Looks as though you may be sorted but I did this job recently using Acronis - which I already had as my backup program. Bought a cheap USB lead from Ebay which plugged into the sockets on the SSD, cloned the C: drive onto the SSD, then swapped the SSD with the existing C: drive and all was well. If anything goes wrong, you've still got the old drive to putback in. John M

When I uninstalled Acronis, it left behind some Reg. entries. Bit of research: removing these can cause trouble. Found instructions and got rid of them.

Now, to migrate to the SSD (smae size as HDD), Macrium Reflect, Clone, remove HDD, boot, been OK ever since. For backup, simply clones of the SSD to 2 HDDs.

Boot any Linux installation DVD and use dd

Ah the destructions and boot sectors etc. Brian

Yup reflect works ok as well. I find it a bit less flexible when cloning on to smaller target drives though.

Does that cope with the target being smaller than the source without having to repartition the source first?

Nope. But you can dd the installation off windows, then mount it as pseudo disk, repartition it and then burn it back to whaytever

But its not so trivial to resize a windoze partition.

I am thinking that there should be a way to copy the data off the entire disk partition and put it on a new disk and than mash the boot sector.

IIRC that means dd'ing just the first sector (512 bytes) or so off windoze and back onto the new disc.

Prolly would help to have a linux computer to do it.

Or a usb cradle to take the SSD and the old disk.

IF you use linux tools to do this the steps probably are

2/. Mount the windows drive and copy all it's files - assuming its just one partiton - using tar.

4/. Format it as FAT32 etc.

6/. Finallyt dd the first 512byte block back to get the right disk id and the boot program.

Should boot.

Bootable gparted CD or USB stick fixes that, shrink HD to be no larger than SSD then clone it.

And it is likely to have dd on it to do the copying, so a one-stop open source solution.

No, dd is a raw copier of bytes, you'd want to shrink the source drive with gparted before copying it to the target device.

wil gparted also move the bits of file that are in the bit of disk that no longer exists?

IME yup, gparted can shrink a partition and patch up all the internal pointers etc so it remains internally consistent.

However compared to the likes of Acronis which will copy all partitions, and the boot sectors etc, resize on the fly and also cope with both MBR or GPT disks, it seems like a hard way to do it.

I'm about to do something very similar. I assume your SSD was in a caddy and you plugged your Ebay USB lead into that. Was there anything special about the lead? Got a link?

I just bought a cheap USB3 caddy off eBay (which came with the appropriate lead) as a caddy is always handy.