Windows 10: How do I change the hard drive without losing the Windows install.

Yes but cloning is on the fly. You dont need space to save image.

So if you are moving your boot volume from an hdd to ssd why to image and not to clone directly?

 

There is a lot of misinformation about cloning in this thread - especially if you are using Macrium Refelct Free. Macrium Refelct Free can "clone" a partition in exactly the same way it creates a backup image file. That means copying the partition from one HDD/SDD to another HDD/SDD creating a new partition on the second HDD/SDD rather than an image file, but it does not have to copy free space, and the new partition does not have to be the same size as the original partition. Macrium Reflect Free will only "clone" the used portion of the source partition to the destination partition.

For proof, I have a laptop with an SSD and a HDD. SSD is 500 GB and is your standard GPT partitions, the OS partition is 446 GB total and 51 GB used. I created an empty 100 GB unallocated space on the 1TB HDD installed. I booted into Macrium Reflect and told it to "clone" the 446 GB OS partition from the SSD to the 100 GB empty space on the HDD. Guess what it did? It "cloned" the 51 GB used space from the SSD to the HDD and left me with a 100 GB partition on the HDD that had 51 GB used space that was a mirror image of the SSD partition. The ONLY difference between that operation and imaging is that no image file is created in the middle between the two.

 

yes. thats what i also had in my mind all those years. clone or imaging is the same except imaging makes an image at your second hard drive.

 

Before you do either clone or image restore you would be well advised to run chkdsk \f \r from an admin command prompt on the old drive. This should be done on all partitions on the drive, so partitions that do not have a drive letter should have a drive letter assigned temporarily to perform the operation. Running chkdsk on your system partition will require the machine to be restarted to run the scan.

It is likely that your disk has some form of corruption be it at the file system level or sector level. If you do not correct this corruption before clone or imaging this corruption will be transferred to the new disk.