move boot drive without deleting everything

[spellmanuk]

So i was doing my Bi Weekly PC dusting and noticed for the first time that my mobo actually had an m.2 slot on it don't ask how I didn't notice this i really didn't expect it from a £50 mobo but anyway my question is if i get say a 265gb m.2 as a boot drive is there a way to do that without losing all the data of my current wd red obviously i have back ups of pretty much everything but still the less hassle the better hey

 

so in short i want to move windows from my 3.5tb HDD to a 256gb m.2 SSD without moving anything else 

[Godlygamer23]

3 minutes ago, peej said:

[removed]

You can clone the drive, but it might be better in the long run to just do a fresh install of Windows onto the SSD. However, I'm not sure if you can pick and choose the folders that you wish to clone to the new drive.

[sushisharkjl]

3 minutes ago, peej said:

So i was doing my Bi Weekly PC dusting and noticed for the first time that my mobo actually had an m.2 slot on it don't ask how I didn't notice this i really didn't expect it from a £50 mobo but anyway my question is if i get say a 265gb m.2 as a boot drive is there a way to do that without losing all the data of my current wd red obviously i have back ups of pretty much everything but still the less hassle the better hey

 

so in short i want to move windows from my 3.5tb HDD to a 256gb m.2 SSD without moving anything else 

First offload anything you don't need from your 3.5TB drive onto something else such that you use less than 256GB on it, make the partition that size, then clone the partition onto your m.2 disk. Format the 3.5TB drive and move the files back.

[spellmanuk]

1 minute ago, Godlygamer23 said:

You can clone the drive, but it might be better in the long run to just do a fresh install of Windows onto the SSD. However, I'm not sure if you can pick and choose the folders that you wish to clone to the new drive.

yeah i was going to do a fresh install of windows on the ssd but just didnt want to go through the hassle of removing everything and wiping it and then reinstalling it if it could be helped guess ill just do it properly its probably for the best

[Godlygamer23]

2 minutes ago, peej said:

yeah i was going to do a fresh install of windows on the ssd but just didnt want to go through the hassle of removing everything and wiping it and then reinstalling it if it could be helped guess ill just do it properly its probably for the best

I have done a clone before to my SSD, but cannot recall being able to choose specific folders to clone over.

[spellmanuk]

Just now, Godlygamer23 said:

I have done a clone before to my SSD, but cannot recall being able to choose specific folders to clone over.

hmm okay ill figure somthing out