Migrating Drive Contents

[CarlBar]

Got two new drives coming in the next day or so. 3 of my 4 drives are staying in, but one is coming out. I'm looking for a painless way to migrate. In the past i've just manually copied across and then renamed the new drive letter after removal but it's messy and a pain, plus i've got a second partition on my boot SSD that was for a now disabled dual boot that i'd like to migrate to the same new drive as the removed HDD. Hoping there's a better way to do it than i've been using.

 

Images largely aren't an option BTW, the old drives aside from the one that's leaving are dangerously full, (well not SSD but it dosen;t have enough free), hence the new drives.

[kingknightrider]

2 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Got two new drives coming in the next day or so. 3 of my 4 drives are staying in, but one is coming out. I'm looking for a painless way to migrate. In the past i've just manually copied across and then renamed the new drive letter after removal but it's messy and a pain, plus i've got a second partition on my boot SSD that was for a now disabled dual boot that i'd like to migrate to the same new drive as the removed HDD. Hoping there's a better way to do it than i've been using.

 

Images largely aren't an option BTW, the old drives aside from the one that's leaving are dangerously full, (well not SSD but it dosen;t have enough free), hence the new drives.

Cloning the drive may be what you need to do:

 

May have to defrag afterword.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

19 minutes ago, kingknightrider said:

Cloning the drive may be what you need to do:

 

May have to defrag afterword.

The video says cloning makes a sector by sector copy from one disk to another. Macrium Reflect's cloning defaults to what is called Intelligent Sector Copy. It only copies over sectors that actually have something on them; empty sectors are ignored. One advantage of this is it allows one to clone from one drive to a smaller drive as long as the contents of the larger drive will fit on the smaller drive. I have used this for cloning boot HDDs over to SSDs and the SSDs booted fine when installed in the computer the HDD came from. Of course, it also works well for data only drives.

 

Macrium Reflect also has an option for the more conventional cloning called Forensic Copy. This is the sector by sector cloning discussed in the video. It is valuable for making a clone of a failed drive before attempting to recover data from it.

 

Another way to move data from one drive to another is to use a folder/file syncing program, such as FreeFileSync. One thing that is nice about this is one can select which folders to copy over or exclude certain folders. If a file is corrupted, it will skip that file and report what was skipped at the end.

[CarlBar]

Oh none of the drives are dying, it;s just i'm low on space on the HDD@s and the 4TB is old enough i ant to replace it before it develops an issue. the SSD partition is just a case of now having a bunch of stuff on my SSD i no longer need on there. I just don;t want to have to tell e.g. steam to look on a different drive for somthing, (for that matter steam itself will be getting moved), as doing that by hand is infuriatingly long and easy to miss somthing.

[kingknightrider]

I have cloned operating system drives -when drives dying need replacing and data drives in the past to copy drives of different sizes.

500 GB Win 10 to a 1 TB drive for example.

And I have  used EaseUS for all of them.

Just have to give unused space a partition and good to go.

 

https://www.easeus.com/backup-utility/copy-and-clone-hard-drive.html

[CarlBar]

51 minutes ago, kingknightrider said:

I have cloned operating system drives -when drives dying need replacing and data drives in the past to copy drives of different sizes.

500 GB Win 10 to a 1 TB drive for example.

And I have  used EaseUS for all of them.

Just have to give unused space a partition and good to go.

 

https://www.easeus.com/backup-utility/copy-and-clone-hard-drive.html

 

Sorry can you clarify somthing, are you saying the destination partition needs to be exactly the same size?

[kingknightrider]

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

 

Sorry can you clarify somthing, are you saying the destination partition needs to be exactly the same size?

No.

Start with a blank destination drive.

Then once the transfer completes you have the partition copied and the rest is free space that can then be made into another partition or left as part of the main partition.

My drive was a 500 GB partition drive that became a 1TB partition.

[CarlBar]

Oh right, yeah thats actually exactly what i want to do, empty out the second SSD partition and merge it, i thought you were talking about the destination drive not the source drive .

[kingknightrider]

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

Oh right, yeah thats actually exactly what i want to do, empty out the second SSD partition and merge it, i thought you were talking about the destination drive not the source drive .

No problem.

Cloning can have a steep learning curve but once you get there the options it opens up are tremendous.

[CarlBar]

7 hours ago, kingknightrider said:

No problem.

Cloning can have a steep learning curve but once you get there the options it opens up are tremendous.

 

Cheers for all the help. Does the destination drive have to be empty since i want to migrate the contents of 2 different drives to the same target drive. Also my new drives are 10TB, they're gonna take a small age to fully format, my policy in the past has allways been to leave the system to it, but given the time it's gonna take i'd like to get on with some gaming, is there really any reason not to these days, i know the advice used to be to leave it but not sure if that applies now.

[kingknightrider]

11 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

Cheers for all the help. Does the destination drive have to be empty since i want to migrate the contents of 2 different drives to the same target drive. Also my new drives are 10TB, they're gonna take a small age to fully format, my policy in the past has allways been to leave the system to it, but given the time it's gonna take i'd like to get on with some gaming, is there really any reason not to these days, i know the advice used to be to leave it but not sure if that applies now.

I don't remember but I think EaseUS will format the destination drive but you can quick format the drive -which is good enough.

EaseUS usually lets you select drives to be transferred -last version I used allowed select multiple drives to be transferred.

[CarlBar]

Cheers :). Um one question though, the website for it is a bit confusing i'm not sure which download i need, could you take a look and tell me which one it is.

 

EDIT: NVM google came through.

[CarlBar]

So turns out i didn't find it. What Google took me to is a non-functional demo. it downloads, it installs, but when you try to use it, it demands a license.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Macrium Reflect Free is (duh) free.

[CarlBar]

CHeers it's in progress now :).