Operating System Transfer

Littlenose

Littlenose

Littlenose

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Joined
27 May 2008
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Petersfield, Hampshire
The young lad's PC is getting a bit wheezy, and I'm trying to keep it alive with a few upgrades here and there.
The bottle neck at the moment is that it's running on an old machanical hard drive, which is showing some bad sectors. I'd like to change this to an SSD, but all the disk copy methods I've tried have failed - I lost a weekend to trying this, even put the old hard drive on my main machine to try there too.
Is there a standarad way of getting an OS transferred to a new drive without copying data directly? Sort of like asking the computer to install win11 to another drive with the settings intact rather than copy it directly?
The issue with a complete fresh install it involves a teenager with issues and recalling passwords
 
Last edited:
Littlenose said:
I tried several methods, I can't remember all the methods / tools, but it did include:
  • Seagate
  • Acronis
  • EaseUS
  • Windows
Click to expand...
Have you got any external hard drives, if so I’d boot from an Acronis boot disk and backup the entire partition to the external hard drive. Then restore it onto the SSD. That always works for me I don’t bother with cloning.
 
Littlenose said:
I do have an external drive that I can try this with... cheers :)
Click to expand...
When I backed up my 1.92TB partition on my old NVMe SSD and restored it to my new uninitiated 4TB NVMe SSD drive it had a single 1.92TB partition on the new drive and the extra space wasn't partitioned and formatted.

I had to go into disk management in Windows and extend the partition so the whole space was available on the single partition. There was a couple of other small partitions that I had to delete in order to get the extend option.
 
Littlenose said:
The issue with a complete fresh install it involves a teenager with issues and recalling passwords
Click to expand...

Why is that an issue? Surely he needs to know his password in order to log back in after rebooting...

A fresh install on SSD is about 10-15 minutes, and then depending on how much data to transfer over you could be looking at a couple of hours of background transfer to get it back into a perfect state. Would certainly have saved you an entire weekend.
 
It's semi off topic, but given you're kinda leaving the teenager with lax rules on password safety and retention, it might be a good time to help them migrate over to a better way as well. As you never know when you need to do a full restart and lose everything (ransomware, trojans, etc). At that point it's too late to do much about it.
 
Just something to consider at some point down the line, as it's oh so easy to fall foul of, especially for a teenager where they won't recognise dangers (and even those who recognise dangers can fall foul). :)
 
Meddling-Monk said:
As you never know when you need to do a full restart and lose everything (ransomware, trojans, etc). At that point it's too late to do much about it.
Click to expand...
That’s why I keep a full backup of my operating system plus several games on an external hard drive. My latest backup is 431GB in size and my external hard drive is a 2TB Crucial X6 SSD. I’ve got a number of older mechanical external hard drives with backups on as well most of which I no longer need.
 
You can install windows 11
To another drive with the settings intact like you asked
By being signed into a Microsoft account
Bad news is it only copies your windows settings
Windows apps etc
It doesn't work for any 3rd party software and their passwords
Last time I tried it anyway

Macrium reflect is my go to
Cloning is quicker
Compared to saving to an image
Then restoring the image to a new drive
But there are advantages to the longer method
If you keep the image
Future restorations
Or some programs Macrium for one
They allow mounting the image to copy anything From it
That you might want

Have to agree some sort of password manager
May be a good idea
Mines stored in multiple places just in case
Nothing to do with parenting advice
Just good computing practice
I imagine every person ever used a computer
Has at one point been locked out of something
Because they had been automatically signing into software
And disaster like a failed hard drive happened
And they no longer remembered their
Log in details
 
When I installed my new 4TB NVMe drive I had no choice but to image the existing drive first as my motherboard only has one M2 slot. This was before I purchased the PCIe M2 adapter it now resides in.

I have never attempted to clone a drive and the backup and restore method has always worked for me. Only thing I had to do was extend the partition afterwards as my old drive had a smaller partition obviously.
 
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