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Post by Slinger on Nov 26, 2015 23:56:48 GMT
Windows 10 was good enough to tell me my C: drive was beginning to fail yesterday. I ordered a new 2Gb drive for next-day delivery from Amazon and had a quick shufti around the net for the easiest way of transferring my operating system and files to the new drive with the minimum of fuss. Whilst I was checking out the (sometimes quite expensive) solutions offered I thought I'd take a look at a piece of freeware I already owned, the rather splendid MiniTool Partition Wizard and saw that it offered a " wizard" to do precisely what I wanted. Drive duly arrived today. Plugged it in, ran Partition Wizard Free Edition (which kindly offered to update itself to the latest version) and it did the job perfectly, including automatically updating the MBR. Shut down after it had finished, unhooked the old C: drive, and rebooted into Win 10. Absolutely painless, and how often can you say that about ANYTHING computer/software related? I am now imbibing more celebratory Grant's than is good for me. I'm nothing to do with the company I should hasten to add, so I know you won't mind a link to the software here as I'm sure it could prove useful to someone, somewhere, someday. MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition 9.1 |
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Post by MartinT on Nov 27, 2015 1:22:53 GMT
Nice one. You can actually do it with Windows Backup and a spare caddy, which is how I've done it many times in the past. The advantage is that Windows does Bare Metal Recovery, which means you can use this method even for swapping to new hardware as well as just replacing the HD.
There are a few things to look out for, especially if you're reducing volume size such as swapping from rotating to SSD, but the method is solid and free.
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Post by zippy on Nov 27, 2015 9:11:54 GMT
I glad to hear MartinT managed it OK for an SSD - on my old (Windows 7) PC I never did manage to do a change from HDD to SSD using either the Windows tools or any third party tool. I ended up doing a complete rebuild and manually copying everything else.
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Post by Slinger on Nov 27, 2015 9:20:19 GMT
Although I haven't tried it the software I was talking about above also handles transfer to SSD. The entire operation of moving the O.S. took three clicks and a reboot which is probably a darn site easier than faffing about with caddys and Windows Backup, especially for any novices out there.  |
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Post by MartinT on Nov 27, 2015 10:26:14 GMT
Yes agreed, I was only offering a more universal solution that also works for all Bare Metal Recovery scenarios, i.e. hardware swapping, and all without 3rd party software. zippy the trick with a move from HD to SSD is that, despite your having plenty of free space, the volume size is often larger. This will fail when restoring the volume to an SSD of smaller size. First you have to do some cleverness with Disk Manager to shrink the volume down in size, then back it up, then restore it to the SSD, then expand the volume to occupy all available space. I've done it so often now that it's much easier than it sounds. |
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Post by MikeMusic on Nov 27, 2015 12:32:25 GMT
Such a pleasure to have really good software. To have 2 doing much the same is great.
Glad to say it's becoming more the norm these days and even MS joining in
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