Mechanical drive to SSD - OS only

bainbridge · 7 Nov 2022 at 16:21

Hi

Apologies for the basic question, but it's literally years since I did this. A friend's young son is an avid pc gamer and has filled the single mechanical hard drive on his budget gaming rig. I suggested buying a 1TB SSD, then we can move over the OS to the SDD, and a couple of his favourite games, and leave the mechanical disc for storage.

My plan is to use a free program with a cloning feature to clone the OS, copy it to the SSD and make this the primary drive. Is there a good free basic program that someone can recommend?

The next job would be to move over a couple of his favourite games. Can I simply copy and paste these into the programs folder on the SSD?

Thanks

Orcvader · 7 Nov 2022 at 16:48

Macrium Reflect has worked for me. However it clones the entire partition, so it won't just be the OS it copies over, but his games and personal files too.

I would be tempted to do that if the SSD is large enough, reformat the entire mechanical drive (there will be some hidden partitions for boot/recovery/etc, won't need them after copying them to the SSD) and then change the folder locations to that drive. It should prompt to move the files but if not you can manually do it afterwards. As for games, if it's Steam, that's pretty easy, within Steam itself you can add the other drive as a Steam folder, and can move individual games between the two: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4bd4-4528-6b2e-8327

bainbridge · 7 Nov 2022 at 23:52

Orcvader said:
Macrium Reflect has worked for me. However it clones the entire partition, so it won't just be the OS it copies over, but his games and personal files too.

I would be tempted to do that if the SSD is large enough, reformat the entire mechanical drive (there will be some hidden partitions for boot/recovery/etc, won't need them after copying them to the SSD) and then change the folder locations to that drive. It should prompt to move the files but if not you can manually do it afterwards. As for games, if it's Steam, that's pretty easy, within Steam itself you can add the other drive as a Steam folder, and can move individual games between the two: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4bd4-4528-6b2e-8327

Thanks @Orcvader We installed Macrium as suggested, the SDD can take the entire is drive contents, but the cloning process was taking an age, it took 20mins to do 7%. I think this is due to the mechanical disc being chocablock and heavily fragmented, it's constantly working away. The young lad has school tomorrow so we set the program to shut down once cloning complete, we'll pick it back up another time and I'll continue to follow your suggestions.

It needs a lot of tidying up, lots of unnecessary things launch on start up, including 4 different browsers!

bainbridge · 9 Nov 2022 at 12:46

Update:

All sorted. The cloning process worked perfectly and the system automatically booted to the SSD with no messing about with the boot order in BIOS. I made 100% sure we were formatting the mechanical drive afterwards

Removed unnecessary browsers and programs and unticked lots of "start this program when windows starts". The machine now boots to desktop in less than 20 seconds.

I wonder how long it stays like this lol!