Windows 10: Migrating to a new Hard Drive?

Hi Forum Folke,


So my hard drive had a catastrophic failure... the machine won't boot from ANY source if the drive is plugged in. I put another much smaller drive from my last laptop into it, and suddenly now the machine boots from DVD. So, the drive is dead/trash/gone. Along with a lot of my stuff....


I've gone through a lot of trouble over the past couple of days, to get this thing back to where it was pre-crash. I've got a new large drive coming (1 TB), which will be nice, but I'm thinking I don't really want to go through all this again (especially the email.... what a pain in the posterior it was this time; maybe it's the newest Thunderbird iteration?).


I did make a rescue disc as Dell prompted me to do when the laptop arrived... wouldn't work with the dead drive in there, but did okay with this temporary drive. It never prompted me for anything, just hosed it in and good to go. I was half expecting it to ask for the product key (which I don't have, of course; Win10 came pre-installed), but nope. Strange.


Anyway is there a way to just transfer everything on this drive over to the new one when it arrives? Most of the 'solutions' I've found involve having a running version of Windows onboard, which I'm not going to have when I pull the drive and put the new one in.


I'm not looking to preserve data; I think what I want is an iso image (?) of the drive, so that the entire installation, OS and settings and everything, get transferred over and things work just like they did pre-transfer.


There's probably a simple way to do this, but if so, I haven't been able to find it yet. Thanks in advance for any ideas/directions!

:)

 

Cloning from 1TB to 2TB hard drive

Whats a good free imaging/cloning program? I have a 1TB hard drive with Win7 and I want to seamlessly migrate my stuff to a 2TB hard drive. Any suggestions?

 

Migrating a Windows 10 installation (OS, APPs, and settings) to a new hard drive on a laptop

Not positive this is the right forum area, but it looks like the best fit.

I wish to migrate my Windows 10 installation to a new larger hard disk drive. The challenge is that my laptop can only have one disk drive installed at a time, so many of the suggestions I found elsewhere which involved cloning software don't seem to be
options for me. Ii am looking for suggestions as to the simplest and most reliable way to transfer my system, settings and apps to a new hard drive. Thanks in advance.

 

Device not migrated (hard drive)

Hi SRandom,

It looks like the driver that you have installed is not compatible with your device. Is the AHCI driver you installed, the latest from the manufacturer's website? If you will be having issues using your secondary hard drive, I would suggest that you follow
the steps provided by Andre Da Costa in this
thread.

Should you need further assistance, don't hesitate to get back to us.