Windows 10: How to Swap 'C' Drive for a Larger 'C' Drive??

I have a Desktop PC with three SSDs for various apps and programs of which one of them is 500Gb which only has Windows 10 installed on it.

What's the best way to go about swapping out this 500Gb SSD which is the 'C' Drive' for a larger capacity SSD??

I've got a backup of my 'C' Drive on Macrium Reflect so can I simply take out the old C Drive, install the new SSD and import Windows 10 from my Macrium Reflect recovery USB stick or is that not a good idea?

Maybe I have to Clone the original 'C' Drive first, I don't know.

:)

 

Extend drive C

Thanks for your help. My primary object was to extend the capacity of drive C. As I can't do this I will probably buy a larger capacity drive and swap them.

 

c drive

The c drive is the operating system drive and without it your computer will not start.

You need to get a boot-able drive and then attach the old drive and use a partition manager to redo the partitions so it has a c drive. Also at the same time make it larger.

 

Upgrading to larger System C-Drive

You can use the System Image utility to backup the old drive and restore to the new. The main limitation it has is it will not restore to a drive smaller than the original, a problem fairly common for users replacing a larger HDD with a smaller SSD but in
your case not an issue.

However it will only create a new partition to match the existing partitions on the source drive. 1st off make sure your current C drive is the last partition on the existing disk i.e. no partitions even unlettered are after it, use Disk Manager to verify
the layout.

Then when you restore go back into Disk Manager and you should find an unallocated space following the C Drive which is the increased disk size. Right click the existing C in the lower pane and select Extend Partition to make the C drive use all the available
space.

If you have any partition after the C drive then it becomes more complicated and beyond System Image to fix however most drives give you access to free versions of partitioning tools which may be able to resolve the problem. Check the documentation/web site
for more information.