Windows 10: The boot partition is located on a mechanical or hybrid drive. Moving the system to an SSD...

How does one actually do this?

:)

 

Saving free space on SSD (Regarding multiple obligatory partitions on main drive)

Gerry Here just copy-paste some irrelevant response.

Well, **I've figured it out**. Here my solution (I Take no responsibility from any damage that might arise from this process, and I do not guarantee it to work for u.)

We'll assume u have 2 disks; SSD and HDD.

Also NOTE: I Work in a GPT-Disk partitioning scheme, I don't know if it's applicable on dos-style MBR partitioning.

General-methodology wich we are going to work with (or TL;DR).

• Delete all partitions on all drive
• Install Windows on the HDD Drive
• Install Windows on the SSD Drive (yes, twice!)
• Repartition the HDD to free up and reallocate as we wish (The only parition that HAVE to be there is the EUFI System (Fat) )
• After freeing up HDD space, move user folder to the HDD
• PROFIT

And in more detail:

THIS GUIDE ASSUME THIS IS A FRESH PC - THAT U DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING U NEED ON EITHER DISKS.

* - Asterisk, not a real step, just additional information

• Boot into windows 10 installation
• Clear ALL partitions on BOTH drives
• Let windows install itself onto the HDD, We'll call this installation win-hdd
  • There is no need to actually boot into this OS.
• Boot into windows 10 installation
• Let windows install itself onto the SSD. We'll call this installation win-ssd
  • *What would happen now, Is that windows detects the recovery and eufi partitions and does not need to create such additional partitions on your ssd. It would only create a 16MB windows reserved partition.
  • *Your boot partition would be hdd/eufi; But since windows detect it's own bootloader it would allow you to duel-boot between win-hdd and win-ssd(default)
• Optional: During windows-ssd first run wizard switch to audit mode (CTRL+SHIFT+F3)
  • *We would use audit mode to:
    • * Optional1: Repartition hdd
    • * Optional2: Change "Users" folder to the hdd.
    • * If u do not want to move Users folder, u can do 6.2 After win-ssd fully boots instead
  • Repartition hdd & move Users folder:
    • Using a 3rd party tool such as "MiniTool Partition Wizard" you can do the fallowing *as you wish*:
      • Delete win-hdd partition
      • Delete recovery-hdd partition
      • Delete windows reserved (16 mb) partition.
      • You can also later move the EUFI to the start of the hdd disk, if needed
      • Create new partition (free to use) on hdd.
      • Make sure to properly assign drive letters to all drive as u wish
      • Fallow
        this guide to relocate the User folder (Starting from Step 2)
• Boot into windows-ssd; If u do not know which one (int the OS selection screen) It's safe to assume that the automatically-selected one is the win-ssd.
• If u have not performed 6.2 Yet, this is the time to do that now.

GLHF.

 

Move Win7 64 image from a partition NTFS to a new drive

Try MiniTool_DiskImaging. Its free tool. It will also realign your partition if you are moving to a SSD.

These are the articles followed when I moved multi-OS drive to a SSD (XP and W7, removed XP and moved W7 alone)

How to Remove the Windows “System Reserved” Partition – TeraByte Knowledge Base

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/205905-ssd-fix-misalignment.html

Along with these steps I used Acronis to take backups (full OS image) and restore to the new SSD and putting it in the proper starting location of the SSD. It might not boot, so you need windows disk to fix it.

After I restored to SSD, to align partition I used MiniTool Disk imaging software. Apparently you can do all these with the tool itself.

But always remember take BACKUPS BACKUPS BACKUPS TO AN EXTERNAL DRIVE OR NETWORK LOCATION!!!!

 

Does moving the pagefile off the boot partition increase system performance?

If you're eating into the pagefile, you really need to buy more ram.

IMO, the only reason you really need a pagefile is if you are doing lots of image or video editing. In that case, I would move it onto a dedicated SSD.

Partitioning it on boot SSD is not going to make a difference and mechanical drives areso slow, any improvements you make through partitioning aren't going to make much difference.