Migrating Dell Windows 10 HDD to SSD

[Dar_BB]

Hi,
I have a Dell Inspiron 560s, which I want to migrate to Crucial 240MB SSD, as the HDD is slow. The main drive is MBR and has 3 partions. A dell one, recover and the main C drive. I tried cloning with both Macrium and AOMEI Backupper. Both fail during the cloning stage for different reasons. One says the partition is blocked, the other cannot write. I guess I could try other tools, but I was thinking it might be easier to start a fresh. However, moving the software and licenses puts me off. Also, the machine was bought with Win7 and underwent that free (unrequested) upgrade. I have the Win7 code, but don't know if it works. In any event, I was wondering if I could use the Windows recover USB I just created to format and fill the SSD, and use backup recovery software to get the rest over. I know it is not pretty, but I was hoping it would get the job done. Any ideas if this will work. Also, do I have to format the SSD first, and how do I do this. Win10 only allows a Primary volume in its format tool. I would think I want a Bootable, NTFS MBR volume, but maybe the recover tool takes care of this. Obviously, my old HD-C drive would be disconnected during this time. Any helpful hints would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ArtPog]

There are basically four criteria necessary before a successful disk-cloning ("data-migration") operation should be contemplated...

1. Does your present system function without any problems in that the system boots without incident and thereafter functions trouble-free?
2. Are you comfortable enough with your present system that you would have no qualms in having what amounts to a bit-for-bit copy of that system transferred to your new drive?
3. Is the disk-capacity of the new drive sufficient to contain the total contents of the drive that you would like to transfer?
4. And can we assume the destination drive (your Crucial SSD) is non-defective?

If you can answer "yes" to the above questions I would see no reason why you should not use a data-migration (disk-cloning) program to effect the transfer of data even though your previous attempts did not meet with any success. It is true that the fact you employed two different d-c programs and both of them apparently failed is an ominous sign. So something else may be amiss here.

 

[Dar_BB]

Thanks for this, and while the crucial SSD was unformatable in the old "windows 10", it was being detected in the bios. I also tried acronis, which came with the SSD. It also failed. So, I thought it was a bad SSD (or an incompatible one). However, Windows would install on it and I think the real problem was the partitions and/or Dell/Win7-Win10-Upgrade issues. And Yes, the amount to be copied was less than the size of the SSD, which is a basic prerequisite to Migrating. I agree that there was an issue with the "old windows 10".

Now, I did get it working using the following steps:
1. Switch to SSD as primary and Install Win10-Home from bootable SSD, which had been created with Microsoft's Media Creation Tool. It detected my old Win10 Activation, which was a free upgrade from Win7. In my case, this installed all of the drivers and created a clean boot.
2. Clean up old drive and run chkdsk/f and defrag.
3. From the old drive, download Disk2Vhd.exe from Microsoft site to make an Image of my old drive. This image was written directly to an external Passpord drive connected via USB, but could have been a network drive as well. I did not want to touch my old drive, as this was my "fail safe" in case something went wrong. This takes a while.
4. Switch back to SSD using bios boot settings (or swtiching cables).
5. I purchased LapLink PCmover Image & Drive Assistant ($40). Yeah, we used to use LapLink to transfer via parallel cables before the days of networks. They are still around.
6. Mounted the image from the HDD as a logical drive. I use the free version of Macrium Reflect, but I think there are other ways to do this.
7. Run the PC Mover software, which copied accounts and software. It marks the software packages in red,yellow,green--depending on the likelihood of success. I keep the green and only some of the others. This took an hour to copy.
8. The new Win10 was now up and running. I wasted much time coming to these steps, but once I figured it out, it used very little of my time. Which is why I posted this.

I did have the following issues after copying software, which I could resolve:
a) Microsoft Office would not activate. Entering the key or email would not help. But installing from the original setup script that came with the purchase fixed this issue.
b) An obscure issue where the Administrator account would go blank for several minutes after logon. This is a known Anniversary edition bug to do with Cisco (CDP) services. I removed the reference to the DLL under the registry entry: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{8D8F4F83-3594-4F07-8369-FC3C3CAE4919}. I found this by seeing that the App Readiness service was causing the delay, while the event logs showed a message regarding a connection issue. A google search gave me the solution.
c) I chose to reinstall a few programs but the PC Mover software transferred all of the settings/data/bookmarks (e.g. FireFox).

I don't think I saved time over just doing a clean install right from the bat. In fact, this took much longer. However, this PC is used by the family and not me and this method copied all of the settings and much of the software. This means they will be bugging me less when things aren't as they were before