Cloning from Old to New SSD on my Laptop

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KSadek

Commendable
Oct 6, 2016
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Hi there,

I'm a complete noob so please bear with me. I recently bought a Lenovo Y700 laptop (14ISK-1TB+128GB SSD-8GB RAM-Win10).

When I got it I found that windows is installed on the 128 GB m.2 SSD, with only about 50GB free out of the box. Seeing that the C drive would fill up in no time when I start installing my programs, I decided to buy a regular 2.5 inch SSD (Samsung 850 Evo 500GB) to install in place of the mechanical 1TB hard drive, so now I have the 128 m.2 SSD and the new 500 GB 2.5" SSD installed.

Thankfully I had no issues installing the new SSD and initializing it, but I have no experience in what I'd like to do next:

1)Now that I have a new SSD that has a much larger capacity, I'd like to clone win10 to it. This is probably easy with the included cloning Samsung Data Migration software. However, I couldn't find an answer on the forum for what would happen when you clone to a new SSD and have both installed at the same time. Where would windows 10 boot from then?

2)After I clone win10 to the new 500GB drive and sort the booting issue how do I delete win10 from the 128GB ssd?

3)Should I completely format the old 128GB drive or should I leave the recovery partition included in it in case one day I need to reinstall windows? Could I reinstall windows in the future on the new 500GB ssd if the recovery partition is on another drive?

4)Finally, after I have windows on the new 500GB drive, would I be able to make it my C drive and make programs install by default on it?

I know some of these questions might sound too easy but as I said I have no experience with doing this. Hopefully this post might help a fellow noob in the future.

Sorry about the extremely long post but I just wanted to make my request clear.
 
Solution
Boogieman_WD
Hey there, KSadek.

1. Clone the small SSD over to the new one. After the cloning process has been completed. Restart your laptop and go to your BIOS/UEFI. In there you should look for the boot priority menu (it's different for the different versions of BIOS/UEFI, so you should look it up in the laptop's User Manual). From there, select the new SSD as the first booting option, after that save & exit. After the laptop restarts, if the cloning process was successful you should be booted to Windows via the new SSD, which should also be the C: drive. You could go ahead and disconnect the small SSD and boot to Windows by using the SATA SSD alone, to make sure that everything works fine and that the cloning process has been successful.

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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

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Jul 31, 2014
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Hey there, KSadek.

1. Clone the small SSD over to the new one. After the cloning process has been completed. Restart your laptop and go to your BIOS/UEFI. In there you should look for the boot priority menu (it's different for the different versions of BIOS/UEFI, so you should look it up in the laptop's User Manual). From there, select the new SSD as the first booting option, after that save & exit. After the laptop restarts, if the cloning process was successful you should be booted to Windows via the new SSD, which should also be the C: drive. You could go ahead and disconnect the small SSD and boot to Windows by using the SATA SSD alone, to make sure that everything works fine and that the cloning process has been successful.

2. You could reformat the partition associated with Windows by going to Disk Management - right mouse click and format (note that you should be using the new drive to boot to Windows in order for this to work) and then use the unallocated space to create a "new simple volume" to use it as regular storage.

3. If you clone the whole drive you should have the recover partition on the new SSD as well. I'd recommend that after you make sure that the cloning process is successful and everything's up and running, that you reformat the whole SSD (the 128GB one). You should be able to recover your system by using the recovery partition no matter if it was cloned. You could even back it up to a DVD or external drive. Another option would be to create a Windows 10 recovery drive: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/instantanswers/3a747883-b706-43a5-a286-9e98f886d490/create-a-recovery-drive and recover you system if you need to by following this tutorial: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12415/windows-10-recovery-options.

Hope that covers everything. Please let me know if there's anything else, or if I've missed something.
Boogieman_WD
 
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Solution
K

KSadek

Commendable
Oct 6, 2016
3
0
1,510


Hi Boogieman_WD

Thank you very much for your quick response! Your reply actually answered almost all of my questions.

I'm still not 100% sure about a few things:

-Since both SSDs are inside the laptop, is there a way I could verify that windows is booting from the new bigger SSD before I go ahead and format the old one? I'd prefer not to have to open up the laptop again.

-After I clone and format the old drive, will the new drive automatically become the default destination when installing programs? If I understand correctly, all i have to do next would be to switch the drive letters from disk management. Is that right?

Thanks again for your help.
 
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

Judicious
Jul 31, 2014
6,050
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Basically when you complete the cloning process and select the new 500GB drive as the first booting option and boot to Windows by using it, this drive would be your C: drive.
If there's signature collusion with the old SSD, you'd have to go to Disk Management and assign it a new drive letter in order to appear in Windows Explorer (This PC, My Computer).

As for checking if you've booted from the proper drive, you just have to check the size of the disk with drive C:, as the drive you've used to boot to Windows will always show up as C:. Note that you should check it in Disk Management.

Oh and about the default destination drive, it will be the one you've used to boot to Windows, so basically the C:\Program Files\ of your 500GB SSD

Let me know how it goes. :)
 
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K

KSadek

Commendable
Oct 6, 2016
3
0
1,510
Hi Boogieman_WD

Thanks again for your help. I've gone ahead and cloned my old drive to the new SSD. After that I only needed to restart and bring the new SSD online. I've also managed to change the boot order to the new ssd (found a simple youtube tutorial). However something has gone wrong afterwards when windows attempts to boot from the new SSD. I've repeated this process twice with the same end result.

-The first time I reboot after exiting BIOS, I get a blue screen saying windows failed to shut down properly (I didn't record the error code, sorry) and that I need to repair my PC. However it also gives me an option to restart, which I did. When I restart windows manages to reach the sign in screen but then the screen starts flickering and the laptop doesn't respond to any input. Thankfully I'm able to shut down manually and switch back the boot sequence to the old SSD which still works.

Do you have an idea what could be causing this? I've read somewhere that this used to happen for some PCs when upgrading to win10 from an older version due to outdated display drivers, but I've updated both between both with no result.

Thank you.

#########UPDATE#########

I finally figured out how to solve this problem. I searched and found this post on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3yq2mw/desktop_flickering_after_cloning_hd_and_booting/.

As far as I can understand the issue was caused by the Samsung Data Migration Software not cloning the disk partitions exactly as it should. So,this post recommended using another cloning software called Macrium Reflect, which is less streamlined but has the option to choose which partitions exactly to clone to the new drive. (there's a link to a youtube video in the post)

With this method, windows booted fine from the new SSD. However, the problem is when I copied everything as is from the old drive, I forgot to enlarge the windows partition so I ended up with a windows partition exactly as big as the old ssd and the free space could only be used for a new seperate partition(because there were OEM Recovery partitions after it so I couldn't enlarge the windows partition). Therefore you have 2 solutions for this:

1)Either remember to enlarge the window partition while cloning with this software and then add the following partitions present on the old drive

2)Or you could do like I did and just ignore the partitions located after the windows partition. When I first did that windows was unable to create a recovery disk when I booted from the new SSD, so I suspected one of the partitions left out caused this. So, with some trial and error I figured out which of the left out partitions fixed this when I included them in the clone. However, I placed it before the windows partition like I explained earlier like shown

https://postimg.cc/image/garfoc2pf/

It took some trial and error with the cloning but it worked out well at the end thankfully.

Final note: If like me your laptop is still new and/or still hasn't got any important data on it, I guess you're better off just using the Windows Media Creation Tool to install windows from scratch on the new drive.
https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows10

Thanks a lot Boogieman_WD for your help.

Hopefully this could help a fellow noob in the future

 
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