Can't get filmed drive to boot

[ntbohl]

I seem to have a bit of a conundrum here. If I search these forums for a solution for moving my windows 10 operating system to my new m.2 ssd (256gb), I see almost unanimously that cloning my c partition (400gb, only 43gb worth of content) to the new drive is the answer (I want to use the hdd for storage when this is all said and done). However if I search for "cloned ssd drive won't boot OS" I see a lot of responses saying that cloning is unreliable and that I should make a reinstall disc or USB, boot from that and install windows to my ssd from that. The problem with that is that my ultrabook had no optical drive and I am currently unable to find a usb drive. I'm wondering if I should shrink the partition down and try it again (easetodo throws no errors during the cloning process) or give up and drive 18 miles to buy a usb I'll probably never use again? Or... I've also read that if there are two bootable drives on the same machine and the OS version is the same, the machine will always default to the old one, so should i format my bC partition to ensure that the bios only sees one bootable option? I would hate to delete everything, have it not work, and have to try to clone everything back knowing i didn't get it to work right the first time. I also know there are paid softwares out there, and I'm by no means a cheapskate, but there are gobs of people that have had success with easetodo, so id prefer to get that working if possible.

Thanks to all that read this and can lend a hand

 

[drtweak]

Trying using Macrium Reflect to clone the partitions. most of us her perfer using that for cloning.

And it won't default from one to the other but what ever your boot order is in your BIOS is what matters. Go into your BIOS and there should be a boot section and you can change the m.2 to primary boot.

Also what model of laptop do you have and what kind of M.2 drive you get?