[SOLVED] Transfering a windows 10 installation to a new drive.

[BadAtUserNames]

Hello everyone!

So im running out of space on my C disk and though to transfer my installation to a larger disk.

I would normally run Windows media creation tool or Acronis true image to transfer my installation from one drive to another, i am however not able to do so this time...

Backstory:
I was running a 1TB HDD (Disk 2) partitioned for 150 GB for C and the rest for regular program installation. The Drive came partitioned this way and i never though to change it.
I got a 128 GB SSD (Disk 1) a bit later and wanted to try it out, however i was not able to migrate the C partition to the new SSD so i decided to just reinstall windows from scratch and use the old windows installation as a archive. I used this setup for several years.

Problem:
So i ran out of space on disk "1", purchased a new SSD (Disk 3) and tried to transfer the installation to the new SSD, but was unable to, regardless of which program i was using.
The problem is that the system partition is still on the original HDD so whenever i try to transfer the SSD the program just crashes. Windows seems too be configured as "dual boot".

I'm not really sure what i can do to solve this, reinstalling windows is not really an option at the moment, i have too many programs with specific configurations to reinstall.
I'm also not interested in keeping the "dual boot" configuration, just want a regular windows installation.

I would appreciate any help regarding this!
Below is an image of the partition table.

 

[PCmod]

A possible solution:
You may have some luck by creating an emergency boot disk with Acronis.
This would require you to backup the OS partition you want to a backup but using this method you may be able to point a restore to the drive you want to utilize via the emergency boot UI.

Hope this helps

 

[thepersonwithaface45]

No chance at installing a fresh copy of windows on a new harddrive and transferring the content you wanna keep to your secondary harddrives?
Or maybe the software that you have all your settings in, is there a .ini file or anything that you can copy and paste your settings back into the software?

 

[USAFRet]

Reinstalling is always an option.
Might not be the option you want, but it is an option.

Disk 1, 2, 3....
Pare the system down to ONLY the drives needed to boot up.
Show us a screencap of that DM window.

 

[BadAtUserNames]

A possible solution:
You may have some luck by creating an emergency boot disk with Acronis.
This would require you to backup the OS partition you want to a backup but using this method you may be able to point a restore to the drive you want to utilize via the emergency boot UI.

Hope this helps

Sure I could try this later today!

No chance at installing a fresh copy of windows on a new harddrive and transferring the content you wanna keep to your secondary harddrives?
Or maybe the software that you have all your settings in, is there a .ini file or anything that you can copy and paste your settings back into the software?

Reinstalling windows would solve this but i would like to avoid it, i have a lot of work and school programs that would require manual reconfiguration. It would take way too much time, time i currently do not have...

Reinstalling is always an option.
Might not be the option you want, but it is an option.

Disk 1, 2, 3....
Pare the system down to ONLY the drives needed to boot up.
Show us a screencap of that DM window.

Of course reinstalling is an option, i just don't have the time to manually reconfigure all programs. It would take several days to do so and i don't have the time at the moment to sit and do so.

Only Disk 1 & 2 are required to boot into windows.

 

[USAFRet]

Of course reinstalling is an option, i just don't have the time to manually reconfigure all programs. It would take several days to do so and i don't have the time at the moment to sit and do so.

Only Disk 1 & 2 are required to boot into windows.

One possibility:

Clone the C partition from Disk 1 and the 260MB EFI partition from Disk 2, to some other target drive.
Macrium Reflect can probably do this.

 

[SkyNetRising]

So Disk 3 - is the new drive for windows. Right?
What's in partition G: (53,4GB of data) ?

Save the data from G: somewhere else, if necessary,
clean Disk 3, initialize to GPT,
copy 260MB EFI partition to Disk 3 (this is bootloader partition),
copy 118GB C: partition to disk 3,
shutdown, disconnect all other drives (this is essential), leave only Disk 3 connected,
boot into windows.

Done.
If you're unable to boot into windows, it may be necessary to fix bootloader. You can do it with bcdboot command.

bcdboot y:\windows /s z:​

y - windows partition, z - bootloader partition

 

[BadAtUserNames]

Hi,

Just wanted to apologize for replying so late.

I have tried the methods above of transferring EFI partition and the C partition to the new drive and disconnecting the other drives.

I keep getting "Error: 0xc000000e" and I'm unable to rebuild/ repair the boot partition through the recovery mode command line tools. Ive tried all kinds of methods from google to solve this but nothing has worked.

Any thoughts regarding this issue?

 

[SkyNetRising]

Can you show Disk Management screenshot with results of your partition transfer attempts?