Windows 10: Cloning to SSD then swapping drive letters

He never booted into Windows from the SSD.

 

It is not clear. I assume he did but it is not clear. Regardless, he was doing essentially the same thing as what I want to do and he got it working. He said "swap drive letters for partitions C: and F:" and "make F: partition become C:". He said he was able to "make computer accept that SSD partition is both system and boot" and we know that that would require that the SSD be the C:, right? He did it, so how can it be done?

I have created Swapping drive letters, including boot volume - Microsoft Community.

 

We have told you how to migrate to an SSD.

Clone your current HDD to the SSD using either direct cloning or by transferring an image over (recommended way). If you are going to use Macrium Reflect Free to do it (recommended way) then make a Macrium Reflect Rescue USB or CD/DVD while you are at it. Make sure you have a valid boot partition on the SSD:

For a GPT disk booting with an UEFI bios you will see a small FAT32 EFI partition that is the boot partition. If you have an MBR disk booting with a legacy bios you will either see a separate small System Reserved Partition which will be marked as active or if your boot files happen to be in the Windows partition itself, then the Windows partition will have to be marked as active.

Make sure your bios is set to boot from the SSD - or disconnect your old boot HDD (recommended way), and boot from the SSD. That's it. You don't have to mess with changing any drive letters. When the SSD boots into Windows the Windows partition on the SSD will get C:.

You can take our word for it, whom many of us have already done this hundreds of times cumulatively - or you can mess around in your post on the other forum by some guy who states, "Well, I got it working, but not sure how."

Sometimes, on rare occasions the boot loader in the boot partition will need to be fixed and the easiest and most surefire way of doing that has been with a Macrium Reflect Rescue USB/DVD using the fix windows startup problems utility under the restore menu.

 

Maybe this helps: SSD - Install and Transfer the Operating System - Windows 7 Help Forums

 

The Samsung Data Migration tool will do everything in the article. The article does not cover the part I am asking about. I did not read any of the 88 pages of commentary after the article.

 

The MS community link simply shows the OP there had split the OS drive up with the System Reserved partition apparently being mounted as a logical drive and why that ended up seeing the F letter while the actual OS primary was still being seen on the spinner. The optical drive saw the D letter and likely another storage drive was present that took the E drive letter.

As for the guide on changing drive letters that explains how to see the drive letters changed on every other partition/drive other the OS primary you are booting from still being the C volume. The flukes seen with XP and Vista ending up with a D designation have since been corrected.

Now as for imaging vs cloning the cloning of a drive here took a full 8hrs.! while seeing an image being a full system image type backup created on average only takes roughly 34 minutes in comparison! That's a huge difference in the time factor as well as you can keep an image for a long time in the event the restored image needs to be replaced at some point or the drives fails and that has to be replaced. Over a period of time of course one image will replace an older one as more things get added in order to preserve what is new along with what has been on the drive.

Restoring an image may take a little longer but you still would end up seeing the image created and restored in far less time then cloning which tends to be a slowwwww.... process.. And it won't matter so much as to what imaging software is used as there numerous available but the time factor will count!

 

It is now working the way I wanted it to.

The important thing to do is, when the Samsung Data Migration software says to disable the antivirus software, don't ignore that. When I did the clone without McAfee everything fell in place.

For the record, it boots the SSD and makes the hard drive D: unless the SSD is disconnected. If the SSD is disconnected then it boots the hard drive and makes the hard drive the C:. The system on the hard drive is intact.

 

Check whether it boots from the SSD with the HDD disconnected. Just to be on the safe side.

 

I did that before proceeding to trying the other possibilities.

 

Except for McAFail being a problem? that is! But that can often be a problem where some system protection will get in the way. With AVG years back I often had to see that shut down as well while with VIPRE only at times. I run with a less intrusive av software but also has a very light foot print in contrast to many programs.

Haven't gone for any SSDs however since the tab for a 1gb has remained a bit too much for the pallete here while I was considering a look at adding in a 3rd even larger 4 or 5tb drive to expand the storage capacity even further! The pair of 1tb OS drives do tend to fill fast here! *Eek*chuckle

 

McAfee came with the system. I already have a license for ESET that I will use with it. I previously used McAfee for a year and I did not like it but it was not bad.

A much bigger potential problem is UEFI. It is much more sophisticated and complicated than the old BIOSs. It tries to protect us but it can also get in the way. Drives might not be bootable with UEFI. There is a safe mode (I forget what it is called) that must be disabled permanently if we install a foreign operating system.

 

You are damn right. UEFI is a real Pita. I sometimes wonder what they are trying to protect us from.

 

From operating systems from companies other than Microsoft....

I don't think it is as much about protecting us as it about serving Microsoft.

 

That's a good thought.

 

Read about UEFI. It is not exclusively a Microsoft thing, it's board of directors also include Intel, HP, AMD, Apple, Dell, Lenovo and IBM. The list of members is much larger. Remember that the original BIOS was designed by IBM.