Transferring windows to another drive?

[Cringe123]

Hello. My tb ssd is full of games, so I want to get an m.2 250gb ssd to store my windows and programs on, and use the tb hard drive just for games. Is there anyway to move my copy over without needing to reinstall everything? Thank you.

[Sjaakie]

you can make an exact copy with Clonezilla.

 

Install Clonezilla on a usb drive, boot from the usb drive with both ssd's attached, select the source and destination drive and let it run.

[Cringe123]

Just now, Sjaakie said:

you can make an exact copy with Clonezilla.

 

Install Clonezilla on a usb drive, boot from the usb drive with both ssd's attached, select the source and destination drive and let it run.

Great, ill look into that

[Sjaakie]

I thought you meant going from the small to the large drive. You can do the reverse with Clonezilla but it takes some extra steps.

[Kilrah]

Sounds like your best course of action is rather to leave Windows where it is and move existing/install new games on the new SSD.

[MonkeyBomb]

14 minutes ago, Sjaakie said:

I thought you meant going from the small to the large drive. You can do the reverse with Clonezilla but it takes some extra steps.

The problem here is he's going from a 1TB to a 250GB and just wants to move Windows to the new smaller drive and leave the games on the 1TB, not clone the entire drive

 

@Cringe123 please confirm.

 

If this is what he wants, not sure that's possible.

[Dukesilver27-]

I think there's a way to just clone a partition, assuming he has the windows on a separate partition (if not, just separate it), you could just clone the OS from the OS partition. I think this guide displays just that, https://www.diskpart.com/resource/clone-os-to-new-hard-drive.html. 

[Cringe123]

21 hours ago, Dukesilver27- said:

I think there's a way to just clone a partition, assuming he has the windows on a separate partition (if not, just separate it), you could just clone the OS from the OS partition. I think this guide displays just that, https://www.diskpart.com/resource/clone-os-to-new-hard-drive.html. 

What I would plan to do it delete all my games from the drive, making there only my programs and windows left, clone it to the smaller one. Then just reinstall them again.

[Cringe123]

On 9/7/2022 at 10:57 PM, MonkeyBomb said:

The problem here is he's going from a 1TB to a 250GB and just wants to move Windows to the new smaller drive and leave the games on the 1TB, not clone the entire drive

 

@Cringe123 please confirm.

 

If this is what he wants, not sure that's possible.

Yes it is. But I would delete my games and just reinstall them once windows is moved.

[MonkeyBomb]

15 hours ago, Cringe123 said:

Yes it is. But I would delete my games and just reinstall them once windows is moved.

 

Then you can use Marcium Reflect free.  It works really well.

[wseaton]

Clonezilla is utter trash. Nobody uses Clonezilla for backups and iits not partition or OS aware. 

 

You can clone Windows live in place with Macrium reflect. It can go from different size drives provided there's room.