Windows 10: New SSD coming through.

Hello Forum,

SMART gave a warning today practically telling me to back up my stuff, my HDD is going down soon. I just ordered a 500GB SSD (same size as my OS HDD) which will come in on Friday, but I have some questions here..

I will most likely be cloning my hdd over tot he ssd, but the HDD already has unrecoverable bad sectors, is this something that will cause issues cloning the drive? The computer is fully functional, the only thing that happens is that the drive sometimes gets to 100% and a freeze up happens until it dials back down, but there are no noises, yet.

I am also aware that clean installing windows 10 on an SSD may be the best way to go.. in that case would it be wise to install the SSD on windows 10 before doing the clean install and just opt to install on the SSD instead? Will this require a reactivation considering I have an upgrade license?

Or would it just be better to clone the drive, backup my data into a more reliable HDD, and then reinstall windows onto the cloned drive?

Thanks for the help!

:)

 

Windows 10 - SSD Fault

Hi,

I upgraded from W7 last year (using the standard upgrade process) and everything has been working amazingly!

Just before the upgrade, for W10 purposes, I bought a new SSD and moved the W7 instance first over to the SSD and upgraded to W10 from there.

Just come back to my computer aftert the weekend and it appears the SSD has become faulty (gone through all the usual checks) and Sandisk will be replacing it under warranty. I only noticed the problem when I couldn't connect to some shares and after looking
at the PC it had booted into my existing W7 instance as the same drive was still in there (which is good news as it has allowed me to have a computer to some degree!)

My question is - can I go through the same process all over again? Move the W7 instance to the new SSD when it comes and upgrade from there? Will MS allow me to "upgrade" again? It is going on the same PC etc. I originally wanted to do a clean install but
the upgrade process was so smooth and sped everything up I didn't bother.

I think a clean install would work wouldn't it as the license is now based on the actual computer from memory?

Any advice would be great!

Cheers

 

Transfer or clone OS from one SSD to larger new SSD

I currently have windows 10 home on my computer and i want to clone the boot drive SSD (250 Gb) to a new larger 500Gb SSD and have that as my. Boot drive. Which migration software works best with windows 10, free or otherwise. They are Samsung SSD's so
i was just going to try their migration software that comes with the new SSD. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

 

Cloning works great! If you're getting a Samsung SSD, they have a cloning tool that works as easy as can be fathomed. I recently upgraded to their 850 Evo (500gb) and cloned my old Crucial 128gb easily. The entire process took less than 20 minutes. I'm not sure if it's compatible with third-party drives or not. If not, or you want something broader, check out Macrium Reflect Free. The free edition has many features unlocked already and is a good imaging tool by itself. I'm currently using it as my backup software. Either way, go ahead and image now just to be safe. Good luck!

 

Cloning may work but corrupted and unreachable files will stay in same shape.
There's one good reason to do clean install on SSD. For SSD to work properly it should be connected to SATA in AHCI mode and that could be big bother if HDD it's replacing is in IDE mode. There are ways to do it even if it's in IDE mode but as I said it's big bother and no guarantees to work. If you have UEFI than it may get even worse. When doing clean install, windows will set everything up for best SSD performance and that's why I would recommend clean installation.

 

In this case, I would back up my files, then image the drive to an external just in case I missed something, but I'd opt for a clean install on the new drive. Clean installs can be done so quickly now that I wouldn't even spend time debating the options.

 

I'm with Deacon ... *Smile

Now is the perfect time to do a clean install, and then grab data you need from a backup for the new system.