Today, we're going to clone all partitions of a hard drive to an M.2 SSD drive,
including the bootable Windows partition. I'll use a free program called Macrium
Reflect to perform the clone. In a previously published video, I installed
an M.2 2280 slot SSD module in a brand new Dell Inspiron 5570 laptop. My
intent is to use the fast SSD as my boot drive, and to use the slow 5400 rpm 1TB
hard drive that originally came with the laptop as a secondary drive.
Please keep in mind that I'm using the Dell Inspiron 5570 specifically for this
video. I'm basically starting in the state where I left it in my last video.
I've booted off the 1TB hard drive after installing the M.2 SSD. In
addition, I've created an account in Windows so I can log in, and I've
installed Camtasia so I can capture these screens. Understand that we're
going to clone the entire disk as Dell gave it to us - so that includes all the
programs, drivers, and all the shovelware that Dell has installed. Now if you want
to remove certain programs before performing the clone, that's up to you.
The first thing I'll do is right-click the Start button and select Disk
Management. You can see that the 360GB SSD is showing up successfully.
We don't need to initialize the SSD, nor do we have to create any partitions,
because Macrium Reflect will handle the creation of those partitions during the
clone - on-the-fly. What we'll do is clone Disk 0, which is the slow 5400 rpm drive,
to Disk 1, which is the SSD. Let me close this out, and we'll spin up the web browser.
Let's begin by searching for Macrium Reflect Free.
Click on the first result - which takes us to Macrium's website - and
download the version for Home Use. Let's then click the Save button. This is a
relatively small file, which is just a download manager stub that retrieves a
larger installer later on. Click the Run button, and using the defaults, let's hit
Download, after which the installation process starts.
Clicking Next installs the first component, which is the pre-installation
environment, or the PE components for Windows. After that, it launches the Setup
Wizard for Macrium Reflect. Let's click Next.
We'll accept the terms of the license agreement; let's choose the Home Edition;
and we'll register our software at a later time so I'll click No on this
screen. Let's keep the defaults for installation, then click Next.
Finally, click install.
Let's go ahead and Finish to close out the wizard, and launch the actual program.
Again, a registration screen pops up, which I'll skip for now. What we see here
is Disk 1, which is the slow 5400 rpm 1TB drive. The plan is to clone all
six partitions over to the new drive labeled Disk 2, which is our SSD.
Remember - these drives were labeled disks zero and one in the Disk Management screen
earlier, and they're now called Disks one and two, respectively. So don't get confused
about the numbering - they've just been incremented by one. Before you perform
the clone, I highly recommend that you create a rescue disk by going to Other
Tasks, and Create Rescue Media from the menu - just in case something goes wrong.
I'm going to go through the steps of creating it, because this actually saved
me once as I was deleting partitions that I shouldn't have been touching.
Let's click Next; then Next again to include the drivers;
we'll use the defaults here and click Next, which builds the Windows PE image.
This can take a little while, so I'll fast forward.
After that completes, you'll need to provide either a USB drive or a blank CD or DVD.
I myself like to use the cutting-edge technology of blank CDs, so I'll insert one
into my CD/DVD drive, after which I'll click Finish.
Burning the CD will take some time, so let's take a quick break.
Once the CD has been written, take it out of the drive and keep it in a safe place.
The next step is to clone from the 1TB hard drive shown here, to the
SSD. Let's click Clone This Disk, and then select a disk to clone to, which of
course is the SSD. Now the problem is that the source drive is 1TB
while the SSD is only 360GB, so we won't be able to do a bit-by-bit
clone to the SSD. You'll notice that we have six partitions, the largest being
the third one, where Windows resides. All the others are in the megabyte or low
gigabyte range, so by comparison they're negligible in size. It's kind of
misleading because the boxes representing the partitions aren't to
scale. We'll need to reduce the size of the Windows partition to make everything
fit into the 360GB space. We'll start by dragging and dropping the
smaller partitions into the destination box. By doing so, we're leaving the
remaining space for the final partition. When I drag that down, it will
automatically resize it to fit - from 918GB down to
321 - using up all space in the SSD. We can now click
Next. You use this screen if you want to schedule the clone on a regular basis,
but for us, this will be a one-time operation so we can skip it. After
reviewing the summary, let's click Finish. We do want to run the backup now, but
there's no need to save the backup as an XML since again, we're only doing this
once. Let's click OK. This starts the cloning process, which
will take a while, so let's put some pizza in the toaster oven, and I'll be right back.
OK, the clone is a success, so I'll close the dialog boxes to show you that
we have all six partitions copied over to the SSD.
Launching Windows Explorer and opening This PC, you can see we've got the
original 1TB drive and the 360GB SSD drive here.
Now all we need to do is swap these two drives, so let's go ahead and restart the machine.
When the Dell splash screen shows up, you'll need to press the F2 key to enter the BIOS.
This is where we're going to swap the drives.
Click on Boot Sequence, which shows that the SSD is the second device
in the boot order. What you'll want to do is click on the SSD and click on the up
arrow to move it into first place. In fact, I'll go ahead and deselect the
Windows Boot Manager to make sure that the SSD is the ONLY device that we can
boot from. I'll go one step further and enter the System Configuration, and then
Drives, and I'll disable SATA-0, which is the 1TB hard drive - to prove
that we're booting from the SSD. Let's Apply the changes, Save as Custom User
Settings. click OK, and then Exit - which will reboot the machine.
Now when it first starts, you'll see this screen. You won't see the screen again upon
subsequent reboots. What you'll want to do is click Continue in order to boot into the SSD.
We're back in Windows, and though I haven't shown you the elapsed
time, it has booted much faster. Let's take a look at Windows Explorer, where
the C Drive is indeed showing as 360GB. The older drive of course
doesn't even appear, since it's disabled in the BIOS. Launching Macrium Reflect,
we see the 360GB space, and we also see that all six partitions have
successfully made it over, including the bootable Windows partition. The only
thing left to do now is to re-enable the SATA-0 in the BIOS, and that will give us
the old 1TB drive back - which we can then use as a storage drive. But
before you start deleting partitions or files from the slower drive, MAKE SURE to
successfully boot from the SSD often, and over a period of time.
Either that, or make sure you create an image of the original disk before erasing it.
And always keep the rescue CD handy, just in case you need it in the future.
I hope you enjoyed - Thanks for watching!