swapping boot drive

[TheShadowA15]

i got a new ssd want to change boot drive over to it without losing any data ive used macrium reflect to copy my whole boot drive onto the new drive and thought itd be as easy as changing the config in the bios but it didnt work it still boots to the old harddrive what should i do about this is there some thing im missing here?

[Elijah Kamski]

Hey there,

Once you've copied the entire boot drive onto the new SSD, simply unplug the old drive first and leave the new drive plugged in. This will let you use the new drive and boot from there, from there make sure that your new SSD has all the files in it etc.

After it is all done, you can replug the old drive again and select to boot from the new drive to get into windows, if you are unable to select the proper drive that you would like to boot from for some reason, just plug the old drive into the system after the system has booted with the new drive, think of this as a USB, but please be careful to not touch any exposed areas and only use the cable header to connect the old drive with the SATA cable (you should connect SATA and drive not SATA and motherboard).

Once you are in and have made sure you've done everything, you can wipe the old drive clean using Window's disk management and reformat it using the NTFS file system

 

Hope it's all good and that you get it working!

Thanks,
Eli

[TheShadowA15]

7 minutes ago, Elijah Kamski said:

Hey there,

Once you've copied the entire boot drive onto the new SSD, simply unplug the old drive first and leave the new drive plugged in. This will let you use the new drive and boot from there, from there make sure that your new SSD has all the files in it etc.

After it is all done, you can replug the old drive again and select to boot from the new drive to get into windows, if you are unable to select the proper drive that you would like to boot from for some reason, just plug the old drive into the system after the system has booted with the new drive, think of this as a USB, but please be careful to not touch any exposed areas and only use the cable header to connect the old drive with the SATA cable (you should connect SATA and drive not SATA and motherboard).

Once you are in and have made sure you've done everything, you can wipe the old drive clean using Window's disk management and reformat it using the NTFS file system

 

Hope it's all good and that you get it working!

Thanks,
Eli

I did what you said and disconnected my old drives but when I rebooted it said can't find any operating system please connect a drive with a functioning operating system or something like that. So I plugged back in my old drive and it said the same thing I don't know what I've done but the computer doesn't boot now at this point I'm debating just doing a clean install but would like to avoid it if possible 

[TheShadowA15]

I don't know what I did when I have all my drives connected like I did before it just says an operating system wasn't found try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system. When I disconnect everything other than my m.2 which should have an operating system on it cause I cloned the boot drive to it it says the same thing. When I connect everything other than the drive it was booting from it says reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key. I can't get it to boot like it was before I think I have to do a clean install of windows.

[Elijah Kamski]

Yeah, from the looks of it, looks like the transfer messed up.

Looks like you'll have to do it all manually sadly, best of luck!

[TheShadowA15]

luckily had a usb stick foating around used a different computer to get the installer installed onto the m.2 kind of blown away with how much faster it is before it took maybe 2 minutes to start the computer and sit on the desktop waiting till i could do something now i can turn on the computer and be opening up chrome within 10-15 seconds amazing.

 

currently formatting my 2 harddrives into a spanned volume so i can have a single d drive with all my games and such 20% done taking ages to do this 

[Sprawlie]

6 hours ago, TheShadowA15 said:

I did what you said and disconnected my old drives but when I rebooted it said can't find any operating system please connect a drive with a functioning operating system or something like that. So I plugged back in my old drive and it said the same thing I don't know what I've done but the computer doesn't boot now at this point I'm debating just doing a clean install but would like to avoid it if possible 

You didn't cleanly copy the drive and missed the EUFI partition.

 

you cannot just copy the files over on C: to another drive and hope it works. There's far more to windows than that.

 

Get a tool that will either clone the drive partitions fully, or re-install your OS onto the new drive to create a clean installation with a new partition scheme. You will not be able to boot from the new drive without it.