Author Topic: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD  (Read 1682 times)

Valiant

  • aka Sam
    • Radiance Audio
Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« on: 29 November, 2018, 11:25:41 pm »
Hey all, I can't seem to get anything to work.


I have a 1TB HD with 115GB of data which is the main hard drive of my windows machine. I'm trying to migrate everything over to a new SSD. Trouble is the SSD is only 240GB which is tripping up a lot of the cloners.

Any suggestions for how I might get this to work? Happy to do a clean Windows10 install on SSD and restore from a backup if there is a really great way to migrate everything after.

I have a Mac if that can aid in anyway. But yeah so far nothing seems to work and I can't seem to be able to resize the MBR partition when connected via USB to my Mac.
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fuaran

  • rothair gasta
Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #1 on: 30 November, 2018, 02:02:52 am »
Try using GParted to shrink the partition. You can run it from a bootable CD or USB stick.
They have some tips for shrinking Windows partitions here, ie defrag it first. https://gparted.org/display-doc.php?name=help-manual#gparted-resize-partition

Then use whatever cloning software afterwards.

Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #2 on: 30 November, 2018, 07:19:43 am »
I recently swapped the hard drives in our office PCs for SSDs and used Acronis to do a whole disk to disk clone. That was going from 500GB to 128GB. It worked well.

Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #3 on: 30 November, 2018, 09:32:26 am »
Same here, using the OEM Crucial version of Acronis. Not sure why, but the initial install didn't work as expected with the registration (ie, doesn't need registration with a Crucial drive available) so had to reinstall, when it worked fine.

Chris S

Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #4 on: 30 November, 2018, 09:54:51 am »
The mode I use for both PCs I have with SSDs (not including lappie): Have an SSD for boot, software, OS and a traditional HDD for data.

You have to frig about with Windows (assuming you're using Windows) to set the default Users folders to the HDD, but it's something you only have to do once.

Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #5 on: 30 November, 2018, 10:51:21 am »
.....just don't expect everything to follow the move of the User directory. Notably, C:\Users\<user>\AppData stays put, and gets used for cache etc, which is as it should be, but some Apps like Garmin pile humungous loads of crap in there, with no option to shift elsewhere

Chris S

Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #6 on: 30 November, 2018, 11:45:27 am »
.....just don't expect everything to follow the move of the User directory. Notably, C:\Users\<user>\AppData stays put, and gets used for cache etc, which is as it should be, but some Apps like Garmin pile humungous loads of crap in there, with no option to shift elsewhere

Symlink? It'll slow stuff down, but might work.

Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #7 on: 30 November, 2018, 11:49:57 am »
As an intellectual exercise I did do some buggering around in a VM and yes, you can with some, but actually why would you want to for most things? you normally want app cache to be on SSD. It's the badly behaved stuff like Garmin and Tacx that seem to have desires on your c-bytes that are most difficult to defeat.

Valiant

  • aka Sam
    • Radiance Audio
Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #8 on: 01 December, 2018, 10:32:50 am »
Thanks all, GParted + Acronis OEM sorted it nicely :)
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Valiant

  • aka Sam
    • Radiance Audio
Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #9 on: 01 December, 2018, 02:34:03 pm »
Having a strange issue now, when I add a second drive the system doesn't boot. I've tried multiple drives, multiple cables, multiple sata ports. The correct drive is set in the bios/uefi. A quick google suggests I'm not the only one with this issue :(
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DaveJ

  • Happy days
Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #10 on: 01 December, 2018, 05:33:32 pm »
Is that adding the original drive back in?  Or a different drive?  If you cloned it and the device ID gets duplicated?

Valiant

  • aka Sam
    • Radiance Audio
Re: Moving from 1TB HD to 240GB SSD
« Reply #11 on: 01 December, 2018, 08:10:11 pm »
Different drives. It fails before even attempting to boot anything and all I get on screen is the Copyright American Trends notice and Press CTRL + P to enter MEBX setup or ESC to Startup Menu. The choice is acknowledged but neither option works goes anywhere when the 2nd drive is in.

I've tried formatting the drives with various options on Disk Utility on my Mac.

Machine is a HP Compaq Elite 8300 SFF so not exactly new. The PSU in theory has enough power.

Also when I stick in a unformatted drive, it works fine, it loads up, you can then use disk manager to initialise and format, add files etc and all is great, until you restart and then nowt.
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