hdd to ssd, won't boot

[brucewol]

I'm helping a friend who is trying to replace his hdd in a laptop with an ssd. The fun started when he tried to shrink the hdd c partition since it was larger than the ssd. Windows wouldn't allow this and after some googling, suspect it was because there were some unmoveable files on the c drive. So he next tried EaseUS partition manager. This copied and shrank the cdrive but would not copy all the partitions preceding the c drive. Then the system wouldn't boot and a win 10 recovery dvd didn't appear to recognize the drive. The drive is readable if connected to a usb - sata interface.

The first partition on the hdd was a 400 mb recovery partition that ended up as a primary partition on the ssd. The second partition was a EFI system partition which was not copied, The third partition was the c drive boot, page, crash dump, primary and this ended up as a partition on the ssd So what's the correct way to copy the necessary partion from the hdd to the ssd.

This is the write up my fried sent to EaseUS,

I have an HP laptop with Windows 10 using a HDD with 700gb. I bought a
> SSD with 240gb and trying to move all partitions from HDD to SSD using
> EaseUS. I tried to set up partitions using Disk Manager, but that
> didn’t work, EaseUS would not copy partitions from HDD to SSD. I was
> able to copy the first NTSF (400mb) partition from the HDD to the SSD,
> but could not copy the FAT32 (260mb) from the HDD to the SSD. I still
> need to copy the C: drive from the HDD to the SSD, but need detailed
> instructions how to move the two partitions from the HDD to SSD using
> EaseUS.

 

[USAFRet]

If the current C partition is below 200GB, a proper cloning application like Macrium Reflect should do this no problem.

 

[lfkfkfkffs]

easeUS will make you pay $59 once you have it all set up and ready to be cloned over. I only have had 1 drive out of I think 8 that was issue free after using their software to clone a hard drive. It never puts the MBR back on the cloning drive. Unless you have software that you can't get keys for just do a fresh install. When you clone a hard drive you also can clone over problems that could appear later on with your system as well.

 

[brucewol]

Thanks all. made a little progress with EaseUS by using the disk copy rather than partition copy but still wouldn't boot. Have several questions in to EasUS but starting to suspect they don't support UEFI booting.

 

[brucewol]

Thanks all. The computer with the hdd went on vacation for 3 weeks but the ssd stayed home. So I used a usb connection to the ssd and used the free version of EasyUEFI to rebuild the UEFI partition. Then I disconnected all my disks from a desktop and plugged just the ssd into the desktop. After a couple of bios boots I eventually got a windows 10 logon screen. So I think I'm good.

In summary, what worked for me was to use a $16 discounted version of EasyUS to copy the partitions to the usb. This allowed me to shrink the c drive which a number of other cloning/partitioning tools wouldn't do. This left me with a UEFI partition that wasn't bootable. EaseUS says they support this but I wasn't able to get it to work. Then the free version of of EasyUEFI made the ssd bootable. W10 repair mode wouldn't make the ssd bootable either.