Help cloning HDD to smaller SSD

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exodusonfire

exodusonfire

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Jan 22, 2012
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Ok I am going to get the specs out of the way first.

Mobo is an ASRock AB350M so it has the Ultra M.2 socket
Just bought a 250GB 960 Evo SSD
My Primary HDD with the OS is a Seagate 2TB and I have a second 1TB WD as storage
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

I want to clone the OS to the SSD and just use both HDDs as storage basically because I have over a terabyte of pain in the ass files and such (not programs) that I want to avoid losing because needing to format the HDD after cloning or having to keep it unplugged or something.

Is this possible? If so please lay out for me what I should do, i can visualize it well enough in my head but in reality im not too confident what I should be doing in what order and so forth.

I would love some assistance on this please!
 
Solution
R
Shouldn't be too complicated:
1) Move enough files from your 2TB OS drive to the 1TB drive so that used capacity is below the size of your SSD
2) Use this https://www.backup-utility.com/free-backup-software.html to clone your OS drive to the SSD (it will take care of partition sizing)
3) Reboot your computer and in the BIOS select the SSD as the primary boot drive (or even better disconnect temporarily your 2TB drive to avoid having the BIOS identify two bootable drives)

Done.

You could also re-format your 2TB drive later to use it as an additional data drive if needed.

I've used the tool above to move my OS between two SSDs and it worked flawlessly albeit quite slowly.
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Doctor Rob

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Jul 21, 2008
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IF you want an easy program (I have used it in the past multiple times) Acronis software to do that. you would have to move all the NON needed stuff to a seperate drive first though so its less then the 250 GB (I would not add more then 200GB to the SSD or you loose performance.
 
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R

robert.sandru

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Feb 5, 2018
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Shouldn't be too complicated:
1) Move enough files from your 2TB OS drive to the 1TB drive so that used capacity is below the size of your SSD
2) Use this https://www.backup-utility.com/free-backup-software.html to clone your OS drive to the SSD (it will take care of partition sizing)
3) Reboot your computer and in the BIOS select the SSD as the primary boot drive (or even better disconnect temporarily your 2TB drive to avoid having the BIOS identify two bootable drives)

Done.

You could also re-format your 2TB drive later to use it as an additional data drive if needed.

I've used the tool above to move my OS between two SSDs and it worked flawlessly albeit quite slowly.
 
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Solution
Sam Poland

Sam Poland

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Dec 5, 2013
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LOL - I'm doing exactly this right now with Acronis 2017.
 
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exodusonfire

exodusonfire

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Jan 22, 2012
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I am going to use Acronis and follow what you said here. Like I said though I want to avoid a reformat if possible.
My primary has around 1.1 TB which I can probably cut down but my 2nd storage has 400 out of the 1TB occupied so I will see what I can do.

Is it not possible to just clone the OS by itself? I will find out I suppose once I use the program so ill get back to this thread in a few hours.
 
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exodusonfire

exodusonfire

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Jan 22, 2012
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Ok so, in the end I just decided to do a clean install onto the SSD, much to my dismay. I picked robert post as a solution because it gave me an idea of what to do and it would have worked under different circumstances, I just had too much stuff I needed to save and not a big enough SSD, and the exclusion feature of the program just didn't seem worth diving too much into.

On the flip side, I transferred the important things from the 2tb to the 1tb and after the clean install I reformatted it to use as a second storage, the SSD accomplished what I hoped with amazing load times in all the places that matter.
 
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