Windows 10: Need some advice on an mSATA SSD swap

Ladies & Gents:
I'm getting ready to decommission a desktop to give to my sister's family. Right now, it's got a Samsung EVO 850 500 GB mSATA installed as the boot/system drive. I want to swap that unit out for a spare Samsung EVO 850 250 GB mSATA, so I can put the 500 GB unit in my traveling Lenovo laptop. I plan to use Macrium to make that switch but I'm not sure if I should repartition the 500 GB unit beforehand or if I can just restore an image to the 250 GB drive (the actual on-disk footprint for the OS partition is only 61 GB or thereabouts as shown from disk management:



Recommendations or suggestions on how best to make the transfer, please?
Thanks in advance for your input and advice.
--Ed--

:)

 

Windows 10 fresh install, on same SSD

I need to start by explaining a few things before posing my question:

I need to complete a fresh install of Win10 on an MSata SSD drive. The original was corrupted to the point that the BIOS could not read the drive.

I have completely wiped the drive (Diskpart - cleanall)

Next I created a bootable USB with Win10 from Windows tools

I have purchased a clean install product key ready to activate already

It was not possible to recover the key on the SSD as the registry was corrupted and that data was lost, it was originally a Win7 install with free 10 upgrade.

Now comes the complicated part, the machine I'm installing onto is a Tablet PC, however the tablet for some reason will not recognise the USB port of the machine, it will however recognise the MSata SSD. I have tried both the Win10 USB that I created and
a WinPE USB that I have created and it recognises neither on this machine, but both work on another similar machine. There are no available updates to the BIOS Firmware, even if there were I have no idea how I would install them..

My question is this, can I copy the USB data onto the SSD then install on the same SSD? If not then even though there will be hardware variances could I install the SSD in another machine with a working USB and simply swap back without any issues?

I don't want to do too much for fear of damaging my working machine.

I do have a USB MSata adaptor however the connection is not great quality and it is very slow (USB2 or slower).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Dual boot win10 and win7

Lenovo T520 with Win7 Pro installed on msata ssd is Drive C:. HD with data is drive E:. Laptop has dvd but with adapter, this now has another ssd.

I cloned drive C: to the blank ssd in dvd port.

I then removed the msata ssd and rebooted. Win7 came up fine.

Now downloading and installing Wkn10 upgrade to win7 on the new ssd.

Once I have Win10 up and running,plan is to reinstall the msata ssd with Win 7 with view to being able to dual boot Win 7 & 10.

Is there anything else I need to do in order for a menu to appear offering a choice of which OS to boot?

When updates to either system require a restart, will they automatically restart the original OS?

Appreciate some guidance. Thankz

 

You can do this in one sweep with Macrium.

• Connect the 250GB SSD via USB.
• Run Macrium and click on clone this disk under mSata 500GB and select the 250GB as destination.
• Click on each partition of the 250GB then click delete existing partition. The 250GB should show empty.
• Drag and drop C drive from mSata to the 250GB (this operation actually copy the partition, not cloning)
• Click on C partition that you just drop to the 250GB then click on cloned partition properties. At this point, you can resize the C partition on destination as you wish.
• Drag and drop the next partition until done.
• Next->Finish.
• Double check the new C drive is set to Active. Disconnect mSata and boot from 250GB SSD.

 

Thanks for the input, TopGunDCP:
I'll give it a try and report back. But I need to buy an mSATA to USB conversion/enclosure. Found a good one at Fry's for $15.
--Ed--

 

@EdTittel, You are welcome.
Since you did not have the USB interface for mSata. You can make a backup copy of the 500GB to a regular external USB HD then:

• Replace the 500GB with the 250GB.
• Boot up Macrium rescue disk, select the image to restore and 250GB as destination
• Do steps 3-8 above

 

If you're prepared to buy the mSATA to USB adapter, the free Samsung "data migration" software will probably work.

http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor...oad/tools.html

I recently used it to clone a 1TB laptop HD onto a 500GB 850 Evo (SATA, 2.5" form factor). There were 2 partitions of the HD. The Samsung software allowed me to set the target partition sizes. Worked well.

 

Hi there

I think you should first with a partition manager reduce the size of the 500GB's Windows partition to something the new HDD can handle, then image and restore.

Cloning if I read correctly only works if the TARGET (DESTINATION) HDD is of the same size or bigger than the SOURCE.

So you'll need to image to say external HDD

then restore to your new SSD.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Macrium Reflect Free, MiniTool Partition Wizard, and AEOMI Partition Assistant will all clone partitions to smaller size drives. I just cloned a 500 GB hard drive with a 440 GB C: drive partition to a 250 GB SSD with AEOMI Partition Assistant yesterday.

There are two methods of cloning. One is file structure cloning which allows the partition to be resized - either up or down; and there is sector by sector physical cloning which must be done between exact same size partitions, no resizing at all allowed. The three programs mentioned above, and most cloning software, defaults to file structure cloning.

 

I ended up using Minitool Partition Manager to reduce the size of the OS partition to 232 GB, then shifted the recovery partition to be adjacent to the OS partition. After that I ended up using the Minitool Wizard named "Migrate OS to SSD/HD" to make the switch after that because I realized the source drive is MBR and I wanted the target to be GPT. That wizard does the job quite nicely. This did the trick, except that I had to boot to the Macrium Recovery Drive to run its boot-up repairs after making the drive change. Once I took care of that, everything was fine and it's working perfectly now. Thanks for all the good advice, especially NavyLCDR and TopGunDCP.
Best wishes,
--Ed--

 

Now you might want to open a Command Prompt (Admin) and run:

reagentc /info

to make sure your recovery partition is active.

 

Good advice, NavyLCDR. I'll do this shortly. I just blogged about my complete experience in making the swap. Read it at Swapping Out mSATA SSDs Needs Cool Tools - Windows Enterprise Desktop. Thanks again to all who chimed in.
Best wishes,
--Ed--

 

OK, then: here's what turned out to be necessary to get my recovery partition working again.
1. I used the Explore option in MiniTool Partition Wizard on the recovery partition to make sure the directory structure was intact and the files were present
2. I assigned a drive letter to the recovery partition so I could address it in the reagentc command
3. I ran the command reagentc /setreimage /path x:\Recovery\WindowsRE to identify the winre.wim file in that partition
4. I ran the command reagentc /enable to turn on use of that recovery image
5. This produced the following output at the command line:



Success! Thanks a bunch NavyLCDR. I'd totally forgotten to check status on that. Much-appreciated.
--Ed--

 

Now you can remove the drive letter from the recovery partition, it's not needed once the link is established with reagent. The drive letter is only for convenience, you can also establish the link using \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk#\partition#\....