Moving Just Windows to an SSD

[Archetype117]

So, I've been looking into an SSD to speed up the boot time of my Pc and I'm leaning towards a 256gb or 512gb m.2 NVME drive. I currently have a 2TB HDD that I use for everything for everything (boot drive, music creation stuff, software, steam library, etc) which is currently about half full but I don't want to migrate all of this to an SSD. I just want the windows installation on the drive along with 3 or so games. Is this possible with drive cloning software or a similar tool which can just move windows to the new drive or will I have to reinstall windows on a new drive? 

 

Any help is appreciated, Thanks

[Lord Nicoll]

4 minutes ago, Archetype117 said:

So, I've been looking into an SSD to speed up the boot time of my Pc and I'm leaning towards a 256gb or 512gb m.2 NVME drive. I currently have a 2TB HDD that I use for everything for everything (boot drive, music creation stuff, software, steam library, etc) which is currently about half full but I don't want to migrate all of this to an SSD. I just want the windows installation on the drive along with 3 or so games. Is this possible with drive cloning software or a similar tool which can just move windows to the new drive or will I have to reinstall windows on a new drive? 

 

Any help is appreciated, Thanks

From what I've heard plus my own experimenting, you can't clone different sized drives over and moving windows itself over is often a bad idea, just fresh install Windows onto the SSD and delete the old install from the HDD, and keep the files, but back them up first in case it all gets broken, windows loves to fuck up. Whats the specs of your current PC?
 

[ProjectBox153]

It would be a lot easier to do a clean install of Windows.

[Archetype117]

5 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

From what I've heard plus my own experimenting, you can't clone different sized drives over and moving windows itself over is often a bad idea, just fresh install Windows onto the SSD and delete the old install from the HDD, and keep the files, but back them up first in case it all gets broken, windows loves to fuck up. Whats the specs of your current PC?
 

Thanks for the reply, thought that would be the case

NOt the ideal situation as I have allot of custom tweaks and settings added to windows but hey ho.

My current specs are: 7th gen I5 7600k

                                    Gtx 1050TI

                                    SoundBlaster sound card

                                    2tb Hard drive

                                    8Gb RAM

[Lord Nicoll]

1 minute ago, Archetype117 said:

Thanks for the reply, thought that would be the case

NOt the ideal situation as I have allot of custom tweaks and settings added to windows but hey ho.

My current specs are: 7th gen I5 7600k

                                    Gtx 1050TI

                                    SoundBlaster sound card

                                    2tb Hard drive

                                    8Gb RAM

An M.2 drive will work flawlessly in that system, but you can try to copy over some configuration files, however that's a bit risky, I'd advise just redoing it all, Windows given any chance on custom stuff, with custom tweaks, will commit suicide no questions asked.