Migrating Operating System on to New Drive (assistance sought)

I am installing a new bigger SSD onto my PC. I have one already, but it is too small. I have a very complex set up of many programs that takes weeks to configure, so I am going to migrate from one drive to another as an easier (hopefully) resort. I have purchased a much bigger SSD. I am up on fitting it no probs, but it is the migration and cloning stuff I have never done before.

I am using Windows 10. I want to know which is the best software to achieve the migration of my existing hard drive. I also need to know if the software gives new instructions to the BIOS to boot from the new drive or do I have to go into BIOS myself and make the boot change?

Thanks in anticipation. I am just looking for a user friendly easy ride. I will pay for the software if I can get better. I also have a huge SATA HDD so I can make a backup image there internally to be on the safe side rather than have to use an external drive.

I get very anxious. I do everything myself, but I like to know what I am doing before I start. I have already watched and read some tutorials, but want to know how successful it is and if it does work. It is for my music PC and if it goes wrong and I have to load from scratch it ill be weeks of cussing, sweat and nervous breakdowns, lol.

Thanks in anticipation.

I will be doing it tomorrow. I shall get back to this thread with instructions for others as it seems we are short of experience here.

a reply to: Revolution9

Morning Revolution9 .

You can do a lot worse than EASEUS . We use a handful of tools for this most days but have been leaning toward these Guys more often recently .

EASEUS

I would suggest taking a full backup of the disk prior to cloning as you can always fall back to that in a worst case scenario.

Their documentation is top notch and not too techy , well , the small bit I did bother to look at

Good luck .

a reply to: Revolution9

good luck - my attempt to do a " simple " disc migration failed horribly - and i ended up format and restart from scratch

a reply to: Revolution9

If you are going to a SAMSUNG SSD then use their free software
Data Migration Software Version 3.1

a reply to: Revolution9

Just a thpught as I know you do a lot of music work on your pc. If you will have 2 ssd's have you thought about a dual boot so you have one dedicated to your music setup and one for rvry day stuff?

I as this as when I had a home studio I had a similar issue in that setting everything up and all the patches and driver set ups were a nightmare so I had a dedicated seperate boot just for the studio setup so other stuff and installs could not cause me problems.

Make a backup first, because having a backup is the most important thing. Then you'll want to look for software that offers the ability to clone the hard drive, essentially turning another hard drive into an exact copy of the first one. Don't pay for cloning software, there's tons of free software that does everything paid software will do. I'm pretty sure I used either AOMEI or EaseUS. Cloning is a very common and straightforward practice. It basically boils down to being prompted to choose the source drive to copy from and the destination drive to copy to and then hitting start.
If your computer doesn't boot from the new drive, you can simply change that in BIOS. There's a place to change which drive to boot from. It's just a matter of entering BIOS and navigating to it, nothing complicated.

originally posted by: Revolution9
a very complex set up of many programs that takes weeks to configure

Weeks? Lmao. Ok.

Why mess with it at all then. Just use the new drive as a slave for files and databases and leave the drive with your precious configuration alone.

You can use clonezilla if your new harddrive do not have a migration software.

originally posted by: Cymru
a reply to: Revolution9

Morning Revolution9 .

You can do a lot worse than EASEUS . We use a handful of tools for this most days but have been leaning toward these Guys more often recently .

EASEUS

I would suggest taking a full backup of the disk prior to cloning as you can always fall back to that in a worst case scenario.

Their documentation is top notch and not too techy , well , the small bit I did bother to look at

Good luck .

We moved away from Easeus. Made and supported out of china I see it phone home. Could be just licensing but hey, its china. Next to France they are one of the biggest source of intrusion.

EaseUs is pretty good but I would go with Samsung's data Migration Software. We use it at our IT company often.

I clone with Macrium Reflect Free. It does SSD trim and resizes the partitions. Be careful when size of the System Reserved partition is sized. If the cloning software shrinks this partition, the next windows upgrade may bomb. This partition is hard to resize after the fact. With Macrium you can clone the OS running. Or, you can install, create recovery media USB (prompted when opening Macrium), boot to USB and clone.


I have the Macrium Recovery .WIM on a TFTP with PXE boot at my School Districts.


I am pushing to replace every spindle drive at 8 sites with average of 300 systems per site. I would guess at about 400 drives replaced with SSD this school year. To be fair about half were new OS, but teacher and administrations were clones. I just pull the power and data cable from CD, boot to windows, install macrium, and fallow the fool proof clone. Partitions are resized automatically. Only problem is when a recovery partition is at the end of the drive. It does a great job of shrinking the last partition when SSD is smaller.

a reply to: Revolution9

I recently migrated my windows install to a new hard drive because I was running out of space as well.

I used 2 pieces of software.

1. Clonezilla clonezilla.org...
   
2. GParted gparted.org...
   

Both are ISO's that you burn to a cd and boot up your pc to use them.

So with Clonezilla I made an image of the drive and saved it to an external usb drive.
Then I switched out the old drive and installed the new drive on the pc. (Put the old drive aside in case anything goes wrong. Your data is still safe.)
Then using Clonezilla I took the image of the old drive and put it on the new drive.
If your hard drives are not of equal size. Then you will need to use GParted.
Using GParted you will have to resize the partition to to fill out the unused space you will have on the drive.

Now if you did everything right you will have a fully functioning pc with all your old data and programs on it.

a reply to: Revolution9

Quick fix would be to clone it onto the bigger drive, or make a restoration image of the old drive and just restore it using a boot CD (Hirens) onto the newly installed drive.

One more note. If the drive is GPT and not MBR, I have to use rufus to create the USB with UEFI.

originally posted by: gr8skott

originally posted by: Revolution9
a very complex set up of many programs that takes weeks to configure

Weeks? Lmao. Ok.

Why mess with it at all then. Just use the new drive as a slave for files and databases and leave the drive with your precious configuration alone.

Thats what I thought, just pop it in as slave and you just have a second drive for storage, and one for the programs

a reply to: Cymru

Diolch!

Cool, I did look into that one so if you are saying it works. I understand that I can do a backup to my big HDD while I migrate from the small SSD C to my bigger new SSD. I have to move my Windows 10 and all the programs which comes to just short of a 100 GB.

I am also worrying because some of the programs I have are split between my SSD C and my big HDD; I store the big data files on the HDD and run the programs from the SSD C. That is why I want to get a bigger SSD; to obviously have more room and also so I can load data from the SSD to SSD instead and benefit from the quicker speeds fully as my current setup means the HDD drive slows the SSD down when they have to work together. So I am wondering if when the operating system and the programs have moved over whether the path of those programs that worked between the drives will still function, knowing where to find the data? The data has not changed drives, but the programs have. I theorize that it will be OK because of this?

Sorry for my late reply and thanks again.

originally posted by: ignorant_ape
a reply to: Revolution9

good luck - my attempt to do a " simple " disc migration failed horribly - and i ended up format and restart from scratch

Thanks, may be it will be the same for me. I will try. It will be a long headache to have to start from scratch.

originally posted by: MinangATS
a reply to: Revolution9

If you are going to a SAMSUNG SSD then use their free software
Data Migration Software Version 3.1

Yes, it is a Samsung; probably not the best, but my budget dictates. Yes, it might b better to try this. That is well helpful.

originally posted by: nonspecific
a reply to: Revolution9

Just a thpught as I know you do a lot of music work on your pc. If you will have 2 ssd's have you thought about a dual boot so you have one dedicated to your music setup and one for rvry day stuff?

I as this as when I had a home studio I had a similar issue in that setting everything up and all the patches and driver set ups were a nightmare so I had a dedicated seperate boot just for the studio setup so other stuff and installs could not cause me problems.

Thanks, that is a good idea. I have got two PCs now. My other is not a half bad machine for every day use. Yes, it would be good to keep a separate PC altogether for the music as it is all wasted resource having such a big power supply and running the electric through expensive PCIe cards when I am only using them actively on occasions when doing the music projects.

Thanks guys for all these ideas. Every one of them is helpful to me and I am sure this will be useful to others, too.