Windows 10: 1-1 Clone of Win8.1 HDD didnt work (prep for win10 upgrade)

So my dad did some of his research on gaming oriented hard drives, and he got interested with firecuda desktop drives, so I bought him a 2 TB Firecuda Desktop Drive and it came in today (yes I know there are better ones, but he's adamant on firecuda, and im not touching that issue with any pole/stick). I also got him a new amd rx570 card, and I wanted to do this to later on upgrade him to windows 10 so he could use said card effectively. His current desktop drive is a seagate barracuda model ST2000DM001-1ER164. Also, don't know if so, but I think his current desktop drive might be failing, so that's part of the reason I want to get him on a new HDD

I updated his win 8.1 with the updates it needed, and installed macrium reflect afterwards; then I took a look and saw he had an ssd that had some space on it being used; opening up the disk management console, it shows his SSD being used as the boot drive to boot into windows 8.1 (I didn't know it was done that way, but if it works, im not messing with it), so just in-case I used macrium reflect and made image files of his SSD and his C: drive onto a spare 1 TB HDD with a powered hot-swap HDD dock I bought ages ago

Then I used macrium reflect, to clone his C: drive onto his new firecuda drive, and expected that to work after I switched the desktop drive with the firecuda, but after I booted it up, it went to this persistent error screen about "something something windows/system32/winload.exe cant boot, either press this button to retry or press F8 to change startup settings" or something along the lines, but no matter what I tried, it just wouldn't switch out of that error screen, needing a forced shutdown. I switched the firecuda with his other hard drive and it booted into his windows 8.1 just fine, but I don't know why it wouldnt boot into the cloned hard drive just as it would with his old barracuda. Could it be the sharp difference between his current barracuda and his firecuda, or something else im missing; any help is appreciated

:)

 

Hmm... Overall I think Win8(.1 update 1) is better than Win10.

Prefer the immersive Internet Explorer.

 

Upgrade from win8 to win10

I have already upgrade from win8 to win10 before 29 July 2016. After that my HDD is broken, I have to install windows on my new SSD. I use same key which I use to upgrade from win8 to win10 to install win8 (Niow it's 8.1). Today, I want to upgrade win10
and I have some question.

1. Is there a upgrade directly from win8.1 to win10 ??

2. Can I use my win8 key to install win10 using windows10 installation media (with clean installation).

Thanks

 

Clone a 1 Tb drive to a 512 Mb SSC

Hi Vaughn,

You can
clone larger HDD to small SSD with a professional disk cloning software as long as the used space is smaller than the SSD. You will not worry it will clone the unused space unless you use sector by sector clone mode.

I suggest you to clone your HDD to SSD with AOMEI Backupper, if the used space is larger than the SSD, you can clone only the OS to SSD and keep the HDD as data storage. This software is very easy to operate.