[SOLVED] procedure for transferring disc contents to new hard drive

[soureel]

I've purchased a new hard drive (Samsung EV0 980) and need to transfer the contents of my current hard disc to the new one. I do not have a second drive bay and would like to use my USB external hard drive to accomplish this.

It's my understanding that what I want to do is to clone my main SSD (disc 0) to a USB hard drive (disc 1), then boot to the USB drive and clone the contents to my new SSD. I've purchased AOMEI BackUpper and I'm having some issues. Using Backupper, I cloned the entire contents of Disc 0 to Disc 1.

When I restart my computer (Dell Inspiron 7506) and select the USB drive to boot from, it will boot to Windows but only if the original SSD (Disc 0) is in the computer. It will not boot up if I've replaced the old hard drive with the new one. Does this cloned disc (1) include boot manager files, or do I need to first create a copy of Windows PE on Disc 1 (or do I create a boot disc on a different USB device?)

I'm confused about what to do and any guidance would be appreciated.

 

[soureel]

1. Swap the 2 drives
2. Boot up from the Rescue USB you created earlier.
3. Recover, and tell it where the Image is that you created in step 3, and which drive to apply it to...the new m.2

"recover"- is that part of the BIOS, or Macrum ( and does it automatically start)?

 

[USAFRet]

"recover"- is that part of the BIOS, or Macrum ( and does it automatically start)?

Macrium, and it does NOT automatically start.

Boot from the Mac RescueUSB, its on the toolbar at the top.
Actually, it says "Restore" - "Browse for an Image or Backup file to restore..."

 

[Lafong]

The Macrium interface uses the term "restore".

 

[soureel]

ok, fingers crossed, Macrum did find my EVO 980 and transferring image now. LOL, I should have come to this forum first, before I shelled out cash for BackUpper. Lesson learned.

 

[Lafong]

OK; test the bootability immediately.

Make a new image periodically for backup purposes.

You can delete old unwanted images at will, but you are best advised to delete them through the Macrium interface. They can balk at being deleted through ordinary means (File Explorer).

 

[soureel]

So, contents of the old SSD have been transferred to the EVO 980. Now I have 454gb of unallocated space. Yay! But that partition is not adjacent to the C partition. How to merge the two?

 

[Lafong]

So, contents of the old SSD have been transferred to the EVO 980. Now I have 454gb of unallocated space. Yay! But that partition is not adjacent to the C partition. How to merge the two?

If it were adjacent, you could use Disk Management.

Since it isn't you have to use 3rd party app.

The old standby is Minitool Partition Wizard, a free download.

"Merging" implies adjacent partitions, so look for a menu term other than merging.

Maybe "add" or similar term. You want to add unallocated space to an existing partition.

The unallocated space is NOT a partition, so NOT "merging".

 

[soureel]

Ughhh. It's finally done. Had to spend another $20 for a month's access to EASEUS Partition Master- couldn't find a way to do this in Minitool Partition. Quite a learning experience.