Windows 10: Cloning HDD to SSD in a different computer?

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to get a feel on this before i dig into it. I have a dell laptop (school) that i got a SSD for. I also have a clevo laptop at home (main computer), and it has two 2.5" driver bays. Could i install my current dell HDD and the new SSD into the clevo and clone them using this machine? Would this cause any complications?

Thanks,
Ben

:)

 

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.

 

SSD - copy or reinstall OS?

All you need is a free cloning software. Personally, I often use AOMEI Backupper to clone large hdd to smaller ssd. you don't have to shrink the partition for it to fit the ssd,
as the software will do it, as long as your ssd have enough space for the data on the hdd. If your ssd does not have that much space, you can slim your HDD by removing data to another storage device or use system clone to only migrate your operating
system(OS) to the SSD instead.

www.backup-utility.com/clone/clone-large-hdd-to-smaller-ssd-4348.html

 

You can do that on your notebook, but since you will be using both driver bays for the disk and the SSD, you need to boot from a live CD that includes a cloning application. One of them is Clonezilla. So after you have downloaded the ISO and burned to DVD, you can connect both disks in your notebook and boot into Clonezilla. Then be extra careful when selecting the source and target disk so you don't clone the wrong way and lose all your data! Since the disk may contain multiple partitions as well as bootable information, it is advisable to clone the whole disk and not individual partitions. After a successful clone, you can connect the SSD to the Dell laptop and try to boot it. Once in Windows you will have to activate again and that's it.

 

I willl be doing the same thing almost later today but I will be using Macrium Reflect.

 

Thanks bud. Good point on booting to the cloning software. I was worried about hardware information not transferring or something. But I will go ahead and try this out. Luckily my hdd only has my school files and those are backed up already so if I mess this up, I just have to install Windows again but that's no biggie.

Ben

 

If you clone the disk, it will transfer the hardware information of the original to the SSD. So the clone (SSD) can replace the original and boot OK. That's the whole point of cloning, otherwise we would be doing a clean install.

 

Yeah sorry. I didn't explain that right, and I really don't know what I meant now that I read it again. Haha. But thanks for the info.

Ben

 

I meant to use the other computer to clone the disk of the original computer to the SSD. Since the disk is from the original computer, the SSD clone should work there. The other computer is used for running the application only. I didn't mean to clone the Windows installation of another computer. This could work if hardware is similar but then he would not be able to activate legally.