Move or Clone C: to new M2 SSD, How?

Lionhart27 · 23 Mar 2021 at 15:43

Just pre-ordered a Intel 11th Gen Z590 MB Bundle after just received a RTX3090 GPU. (Took me nearly 6 months of getting hold of a RTX GPU!) After I receive the new MB Bundle, I want to purchase a Corsair MP600 2TB G2 Gen4 SSD. How do I move, (or clone) the whole of the present drive C: contents with the Win10 OS on to the new MP600 SSD safely, and then for the PC to boot the new (MP600) C: drive? Would it be better to clone (copy), in case anything goes wrong, and I can re-connect the old drive? Is there a tutorial or App to do this? Advice please.

Grimley · 23 Mar 2021 at 18:55

1. Clone from one drive to the other using macrium reflect (free version), easy enough to do if you know a little bit about cloning software. You need to clone all the partitions on the drive, thats important. Resize the W10 partition to fit the new drive.
2. Set the PC to boot from the new drive.
3. If you've done it right there shouldn't be any problems.

john_s · 23 Mar 2021 at 21:37

As above... Macrium Reflect.

I did just what you are looking to do a few months ago with it and it could hardly have been more straightforward.

Kautya · 25 Mar 2021 at 09:30

+1 for Macrium. Had used it a few months ago to clone my 256gb ssd to a 1TB upgraded drive nvme.

DD_Crash · 26 Mar 2021 at 12:23

If moving from an intel to AMD motherboard is clone or reinstall the way to go?

john_s · 26 Mar 2021 at 21:27

DD_Crash said:
If moving from an intel to AMD motherboard is clone or reinstall the way to go?

Personally, I’d always reinstall after putting in a new motherboard.

DD_Crash · 27 Mar 2021 at 10:55

I was thinking that. What with drivers and such.

ivrytwr3 · 14 Jun 2021 at 12:58

Did a reinstall.

Used w10 to back up files etc, but could not find out how to restore them. There was a file history option which copied everything across, but had to drag everything across to the new desktop.

What did I miss? Lol

Deleted member 77746 · 14 Jun 2021 at 13:00

Lionhart27 said:
just received a RTX3090 GPU. (Took me nearly 6 months of getting hold of a RTX GPU!)

You lucky person.

booyaka · 14 Jun 2021 at 13:46

reinstall would be quick and easy - USB to M2 W10 install takes 15-20 minutes - way cleaner

Steviepunk · 22 Jun 2021 at 10:20

DD_Crash said:
If moving from an intel to AMD motherboard is clone or reinstall the way to go?

In older versions of windows doing this would cause problems with boot drivers, however Win10 changed things around so this is far less of a concern, Windows can detect the changes and update itself as required. If you watch most of the tech Youtube channels (LTT, J2C, etc) you'll see they have a common M2 SSD with Win10 and their common test software pre-installed and just move that between builds as they go. I believe LTT actually did a video about this

booyaka said:
reinstall would be quick and easy - USB to M2 W10 install takes 15-20 minutes - way cleaner

Cleaner, yes. But then it takes another week or two to get everything else reinstalled and configured (Email clients, Office, 10 or so programs I use for development, games and other utilities). I'm doing a new build just now and I think this is the first time that I'll be running the same OS as my previous machine. Combine that with working from home (which means I need to have everything up and running asap) and for me just cloning my existing Win10 drive and putting that into the new build is the route I'll need to go down.