How to transfer from a hard drive to a SSD and a hard drive?

To transfer your OS from an HDD to an SSD you have to use a reasonably intelligent cloning tool. This is because a straight sector-by-sector copy will work badly from an SSD. The data needs to be re-aligned during transfer, and adjustments made to the Windows OS. If your SATA ports are still set to legacy IDE mode, you need to change them to SATA and have the clone tool adjust the OS to work with that.

The simplest way, which works sometimes, is to attach the SSD either internally or externally, set ports to AHCI mode boot into the cloning utility, set it for the necessary changes, and run it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it gets complicated.

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First things last. I started with the last step above. First comes setup.

I recommend having an external HDD dedicated to backups, and doing an image backup to it. If anything goes wrong, you should be able to restore the backup to your old HDD and the system will boot again. Now you have a safety net.

In order to clone, you need to reduce the size of the data on your system partition so that the system partition fits on the SSD, which is smaller than the HDD unless you have oodles of cash. If you have a safe backup from which individual files can be extracted, you can simply DELETE your videos, pictures, documents, and music from the HDD. If what you have left fits, you are ready to do the transfer.

Once the system will boot from the SSD, you can wipe the HDD, partition it as one big data partition, and create a directory named something like My Stuff. Create subfolders called Documents, Music, Videos, and so forth.

You can configure the properties of My Documents to point to d:/My Stuff/Documents, and so forth with My Music and My Everything Else. Then populate those folders from the backup you made before you wiped your system disk, and they will be in My Documents but physically on the HDD.

Someone's working on a "sticky" for this with more detail about various methods, but we don't have it yet.