Move win 10 to different hard drive

[normans]

Hello,

I have 3 hard drives on my PC with Win10 on the smallest one which is now so full that things don't function well. I'd like to move it to a larger one. How can I do this without losing data.
Thanks in advance for help.
Norman Stein

 

[sgage]

When I got my SSD, I moved my existing Windows installation to it by using Macrium Reflect. Made an image, then restored the image to the SSD. Booting with the Macrium Rescue USB stick, there is an item under the 'restore' menu called 'fix windows boot issues'. I ran that, and could then boot from my SSD. Once that was good, I deleted the original installation.

 

[John McGough]

If one of your other hard drives is empty, or emptiable, you could just clone your smaller drive onto one of the bigger ones. I have had to replace hard drives in the past and have used the cloning tool in Acronis which I use for my backup. I understand there are a number of other cloning tools around. You just set your new drive to be a bootable one. You can then format your old one assuming you have tested the new version. I have always found that the cloning tool works well and the new drives have booted up without any problem with Windows intact and all my data and programs OK.

 

[Ellary]

I ran into a similar problem. My smallest drive is a 256 Gb SSD, which is my boot drive. I also have 1 Tb HDD and a 256 GbHDD. So I moved my pictures and videos to the larger HDD since I access them infrequently. That freed enough space on my SSD to prevent performance issues.
Since you don't tell us the size and type of drives you have it's difficult to advise you better.

 

[SmlBizAdmin]

Hello,

I have 3 hard drives on my PC with Win10 on the smallest one which is now so full that things don't function well. I'd like to move it to a larger one. How can I do this without losing data.
Thanks in advance for help.
Norman Stein

I have a co-worker who does this all the time. You just need cloning software (there are multiple free ones available) and then have both drives attached to the computer. They can both be internal or the drive you're cloning TO can be attached by a USB cable (cable kits for this are inexpensive) which is slower, or if you want to be fancy you can get a drive dock and plug both drives into it and do the cloning that way.

Typically with cloning to a larger drive, the clone winds up not using all of the space in the larger drive but occupies the same amount of space as the original drive. You then install the new clone drive, boot up, open Disk Management and tell it to expand the drive so it occupies the rest of the drive space.

 

[John McGough]

Typically with cloning to a larger drive, the clone winds up not using all of the space in the larger drive but occupies the same amount of space as the original drive. You then install the new clone drive, boot up, open Disk Management and tell it to expand the drive so it occupies the rest of the drive space.

I found that with Acronis you are given the option to expand the partition as part of the cloning. I have no connection to Acronis other than a user.

 

[Glenn Nelson]

I'll second the advice to use Macrium Reflect. Very nice free software.
My situation was different. My 512 GB HD was formatted with the old MBR (master boot record). At some point I could no longer install Windows 10 updates and was told that I need a GPT formatted disk (GUID partition table). Microsoft provides a program to change a disk from MBR to GPT, but it would not work for me. So I used Macrium from a USB drive to make a backup of my entire C drive onto a 1 TB HD (it was E drive). Then I wiped the entire 512 GB drive and repartitioned it as GPT (I don't recall if Macrium did this or if I used Windows PE. Finally used Macrium to restore the C drive backup. I was amazed that it worked - and now I could install new Windows updates.

 

[sdmf74]

Your best bet is to store all your data, games, pics, etc. On a NON windows hard drive or two so that when microsoft screws up your installation with an update or it just gets corrupted as it usually eventually does you can easily do a clean install on your OS drive without losing data. Just reinstall your apps.
This also should allow you to keep Windows on a relatively small (500gb'ish) high quality SSD without worrying about it filling up and running into the situation you are in now.

 

[Jonathan Garstin]

Agree with sdmf74. My relatively small high performance C drive is Windows and progs only, all data is on pair of drives running on Raid 1 and backups to an external drive

 

[sdmf74]

I just wanna add that if you have the money get a bigger SSD for your C: drive even if you wont be flling it up. You dont need a 1tb nvme like I am using but it is good to overprovision or leave some space blank so your drive always performs well. Im only using about 100gb of the 1TB, you dont need anywhere near that much unused space but you get the idea.
I just got a 1tb cause eventually when gen 5 drives come out I will be moving this drive to a secondary game storage drive. I have come to the realization that 500gb is no longer big enough to store games on & prices are so low on ssd's I no longer buy anything smaller than 1tb, although I do still have a couple NON NVME drives in my PC with 99% writes left on them but those will be sold & upgraded to 1tb or 2tb very soon

 

[JULIAN GARCIA]

Hello,

I have 3 hard drives on my PC with Win10 on the smallest one which is now so full that things don't function well. I'd like to move it to a larger one. How can I do this without losing data.
Thanks in advance for help.
Norman Stein

I use MACRIUM REFLECT Free to make an image of all the partitions needed to boot to Windows. Then I restore that image to an empty drive (NOTE: the whole drive will be erased so I suggest getting a new drive. 250 GB should be plenty ). You can get a copy here: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
Make sure you copy all your data (Documents, pictures, Music, videos, etc) to one of the other drives first.

 

[ubuysa]

I just wanna add that if you have the money get a bigger SSD for your C: drive even if you wont be flling it up. You dont need a 1tb nvme like I am using but it is good to overprovision or leave some space blank so your drive always performs well. Im only using about 100gb of the 1TB, you dont need anywhere near that much unused space but you get the idea.
I just got a 1tb cause eventually when gen 5 drives come out I will be moving this drive to a secondary game storage drive. I have come to the realization that 500gb is no longer big enough to store games on & prices are so low on ssd's I no longer buy anything smaller than 1tb, although I do still have a couple NON NVME drives in my PC with 99% writes left on them but those will be sold & upgraded to 1tb or 2tb very soon

I also support the idea of getting a larger size system SSD than you need, particularly if it's an expensive NVMe drive (as it should be). This leaves plenty of empty blocks for the SSD's wear-leveling algorithm to use and the drive will last much longer.