Today, we're going to use the latest version of Macrium Reflect Free
to clone all partitions of a hard drive to an M.2 SSD,
and I'll show you how to keep it bootable after the clone.
In a previously published video, I did the same thing with an older version of
Macrium Reflect Free, cloning a 1 TB hard drive down
to a 360 GB SSD, and successfully rebooting into the SSD.
In this video, I'll go further in the process by
completely wiping the hard drive after the clone,
and I'll answer some common questions that were raised in the last video,
including what to do when cloning to a larger SSD.
Before we start, I do have a disclaimer: this video was created specifically with
the Dell Insprion 5570 in mind, so this procedure
may not work for all computers. At a high level, you need to make sure
that your PC or laptop has a way to change the boot sequence to the SSD
drive. Later in the video, I'll be showing you how to completely erase the contents
of the hard drive, which is always a risky operation. Make
sure you back up any critical data, and you may even want
to create a backup image of the entire disk. With that said, I'm starting with an
out-of-the-box 5570 laptop in which I've already installed a brand new 360 GB
M.2 SSD module. If you're interested, you can visit my
previous tutorial that describes the process
of installing the ssd. My intent is to use the SSD
as my boot drive, and to wipe clean the original 5400 RPM
1 TB hard drive so i can use it as my secondary storage.
When you're cloning from a larger drive to a smaller one,
it's not possible to fit, say, 800 GB of data on the 1 TB
hard drive into a smaller space of 360 GB.
If this resembles your situation, you can always uninstall some programs, or
offload data like music and other media to an external hard drive.
If you can reduce it down to say, 300 GB,
the clone will work. Keep in mind that you may have other smaller partitions,
like system or recovery partitions, that aren't shown
on the screen. If we zoom into the drive, you'll see
that the Dell Inspiron supplies five additional partitions out-of-the-box,
each with their own used space. You may see a different number of partitions
depending on your computer. Since they're so small relative to the
size of the main OS partition, you can copy them over without worrying
too much about how much space they take. When Macrium Reflect actually performs
the clone, it will copy the data, along with the
mini-partitions, over to the destination SSD. When you go
from a smaller drive to a larger one, however,
everything will fit fine no matter how much space is used on the hard drive,
but if you just accept the defaults while cloning, you'll end up with a
partition that's the same size as your old one,
wasting a lot of unused space. However, there is a way to manually expand it,
which i'll demonstrate later on. Before we install Macrium Reflect, let's
take a look at our newly installed SSD in Windows.
I'll right-click the Start button, and select Disk Management.
Since the SSD hasn't been initialized, it will pop up a dialog box prompting you
to choose a partition style, which you can
skip for now since Macrium Reflect will take care of that for us
during the clone on-the-fly. Our goal is to clone
Disk 0, which is our slow, 5400 RPM 1TB hard drive,
to Disk 1, which is our fast 360 GB SSD.
Let's exit the Disk Management tool and launch the installed web browser.
I'll then search for Macrium Reflect Free...
and after clicking on the first result that's returned...
make sure you download the free version for Home use,
not the trial version. The free version is truly free,
while the trial version has a 30 day limitation. After clicking Home use,
it will prompt you for your email address, which is entirely optional,
after which you'll want to click Continue. Let's close the Thank You
screen, and I'll hit Run to start the program
immediately after it downloads. When it starts up, you'll see that this
is a small stub program that downloads a much larger setup
file. Using the defaults, I'll hit the Download button...
While it downloads, you may have noticed that the website refers to the same
Version 7 of Macrium Reflect Free as my previous video.
However, this is a new build in which they've made quite a few changes since
the last time we downloaded it. Now that it's finished downloading, the
main installer will start. Let's click Next, which launches the
Setup Wizard. Hit Next again, and after you accept the
license agreement and move to the next screen,
select the Home license. The following step will prompt you to register the
software, where you can enter your email address
if you wish, or you can uncheck the registration box
and hit the Next button. Here, we'll accept the defaults for the install
location and the desktop shortcut, click Next, and finally hit Install to
start the actual installation of the program.
Once the installation is complete, we can click Finish to close out the setup
wizard. When the program launches, you'll see the
slow 1 TB drive that comes with the laptop
labeled Disk 1, divided into six different partitions.
The plan, of course, is to clone all six partitions
in the correct order to the SSD, which is labeled Disk 2.
Remember that these were labeled Disks 0 and 1 in the Disk Management tool
earlier so don't get confused about the numbering -
Macrium Reflect simply labels them 1 and 2 instead.
Before we start though, you'll need to create a rescue disk by selecting
Other Tasks from the menu, the Create Rescue Media.
Later in this video, I'll use this disk to restore the Windows boot partition.
Just to be clear, this isn't a backup of any of your data -
this is just a way to boot to a Windows recovery version of Macrium Reflect.
I recommend a CD or DVD if possible, or, if you insert a flash drive, you'll be
presented with an option to create it there.
Since I still have a few blank CDs left over from the 1990s,
I'll use a CD to create my rescue disc.
Once I hit the Build button, it will take some time,
so I'll take a break to make some coffee and I'll be right back...
OK, we're done. In case you're wondering about the size of the rescue disk
contents, I'll launch File Explorer and look at the properties of
the CD, which indicates around 533 MB of data.
If you're using a USB flash drive, a 1 GB capacity will be more than
enough for a rescue disk. Regardless of the medium you use, please
test it to make sure you can boot to it, because
it will be required later in the video. So let's start the cloning process. To do
so, we'll click Clone This Disk. This top bar, once again,
is labeled Disk 1, which represents the 1 TB hard drive. The bottom
section is where we'll select the destination, which is the new SSD
labeled Disk 2. You should see a blank, gray box
since it's an empty, unallocated disk. What you'll want to do next
is to drag-and-drop these boxes representing each partition
from the source to the destination. Keep in mind that these boxes
aren't to scale; for example, this third box is where Windows resides
and its size is a whopping 918 GB, while the box right next to it is only
461 MB, or less than 1 GB. In fact, all
the partitions other than the Windows partition
are relatively tiny, ranging from 461 MB to the 11 GB range.
Let's start dropping partitions to the bottom. When we get to the third one,
you can see we have a problem: it's so large that it takes all the space of the
360 GB SSD. Macrium is able to truncate the
partition down to 334.59 GB to make it fit onto the SSD,
but then we won't be able to fit the fourth, fifth, and sixth partitions.
So let's remove the third box clicking Undo,
and drag the fourth, fifth, and sixth boxes instead. What remains is
321.89 GB to fill, which we'll do now with the Windows
partition. You can see that Macrium Reflect has shrunk the partition from
918.04 GB down to 321.89, using up all the space on
the SSD. What I'd like to do is place the
partitions in their original order of one through six,
instead of one, two, four, five, six, three, as shown here.
This is because the partition number may be important for some recovery
environments. Unfortunately, I haven't found this to be
the case with Dell's SupportAssist, but I'll show you a solution for restoring
from the recovery partition in a future video,
even when SupportAssist can't detect it. At any rate,
the easiest way to keep the original order is to write this number down -
the size of the truncated Windows partition. I'll then remove this
partition with the Undo button, as well as partitions six, five, and four.
Since we have partitions one and two in the correct order, I'll simply drag and drop
the third one down again, and then click Cloned Partition
Properties. This is where you can manually change
the size of the partition on the cloned drive. In the partition size
box, let's type in the number that we wrote
down earlier: 321.89, and click OK. We can now drag down four,
five, and six, which are guaranteed to fit the SSD perfectly.
But what if you're going from a smaller disk to a larger one?
For instance, let's assume you're going from 1 TB
to 2 TB. You'll want to follow the same procedure,
dragging down one, two... skipping the Windows partition, and dropping
four, five, six, and then three. Notice that the last
partition doesn't expand- to-fit even though we saw that
it will shrink-to-fit. What you'll need to do is click the
Cloned Partition Properties link, and then hit the Maximum Size button...
and change the units to GB, which will give you a number in the
partition size box: 1849.551. Write this number down, and I'll go
ahead and close this out, and using the Undo button,
remove partitions three, six, five, and four... and then resume our partition
sequence with number three. Click Clone Partition Properties again...
make sure your units are correct... and enter the number we discovered
earlier: 1849.551... and hit OK. Once again, drop the boxes in
order, and we're guaranteed to fit within the space of the SSD.
OK, so that was going to a larger SSD; let's get back to our demonstration for
going to a smaller SSD. After you have your partitions set, you'll
want to click the Next button. Here, you can schedule the clone again in
the future, but in our case, we're only doing this once, so I'll skip
it by hitting Next. This takes us to the Summary screen,
which lists every operation that will be performed,
and where we can click the Finish button. Finally, we'll choose the option to Run
the Backup Now, and uncheck the box to save or schedule
the definition as an XML, since we're only doing this once. Once we
click OK, the cloning process will start, which can
take quite some time. I'll go ahead and take another break to
brew a second cup of coffee...
OK, we're back. The clone took approximately 45 minutes, but your
mileage may vary. Opening up File Explorer, the C drive,
which is the hard drive, has been cloned to F, which is the SSD. In
fact, when I click on both drives, we can see that the folder structures
are identical. I'll go ahead and close File Explorer, Macrium Reflect,
and the browser, and finally hit the Start menu in order
to reboot my machine, so I can make some changes to the BIOS.
As soon as you see the Dell splash screen, you'll want to hit the F2 key,
which allows you to enter the BIOS setup screens. This is where we'll swap the
hard drive and the SSD such that the system boots to the SSD.
Go ahead and hit Boot Sequence on the left hand menu,
where you'll discover an entry for the SSD that wasn't there
before. You'll want to click on that entry,
then hit the up button to move it into first place above the hard drive.
We can now Apply the settings, where I'll Save as Custom Settings,
hit OK, and then Exit, which reboots the machine.
You may or may not see a blue screen. If it does pop up,
this will be the only time you see it. Simply Continue
and after a while, you'll be taken directly to Windows.
You should notice that it starts up much quicker since it's using Windows on the
SSD. To prove that we're on the SSD, I'll
launch File Explorer, where you can see that my C drive is now
the 360 GB SSD, while the E drive is my old 1 TB
hard drive. This is where my previous video about
Macrium Reflect ended. I'm now going to complete the
process and wipe out the hard drive so that I can use it as a fresh, empty
drive for secondary storage. What you'll want to do is hit the Start
button and type CMD. Right-click on the resulting command
prompt link and choose Run as Administrator. You'll
then need to type diskpart to start Microsoft's Disk
partition utility. To list all the disks in your
system, type list disk, which shows you the hard
drive labeled Disk 0, and the SSD labeled Disk 1. Since we
want to wipe the hard drive, I'm going to type select disk 0, and if I
list disk again i can confirm that Disk 0 is
indeed selected by observing the asterisk next to it.
I'll then wipe the disk by typing clean... but be very careful using this command,
because it will erase your hard drive without prompting you for additional
information. Make absolutely certain that you've
selected the disk that represents your old original hard
drive. On my computer, it's Disk 0, but it may be different on
yours. After you press Enter, diskpart will
completely wipe your hard disk, including all partitions on it. In fact,
you'll notice in the background that the E
drive disappears from File Explorer. To create a new partition on the hard disk,
right-click on the Start menu and select Disk Management.
It will then prompt you to initialize the disk, where you can keep it as a GPT disk,
which is the default, and click OK. At the bottom, you should
see a box for Disk 0 that indicates an unallocated disk.
Right-click the box and select New Simple Volume, which
launches a wizard. Hit Next, specify how large you want the
volume - I'll just keep it at the maximum size so I can have one large
1 TB partition - and click Next. We'll click Next again to
keep the default letter assignment, and finally, I'll enter a name for the
volume label - let's call it "Data" and hit Next. We'll click Finish to
complete the wizard, after which it will create a brand new
empty E drive, as you can see when I click back on File Explorer.
But we're not finished yet - there's one more step to take,
and that is to boot to the rescue disk. If you've removed the CD that we created
earlier, insert it back into its tray, or insert the USB flash drive.
I'll go ahead and close out all windows, and get ready to restart the machine.
Once you see the Dell logo, you'll want to hit the F12 key, which is the one-time
boot menu. Using the down arrow key, choose your
rescue disk, which in my case is the DVD drive. Press
any key to boot to the CD, and since it takes a while to boot,
I'll take a break and grab a third and final cup of coffee...
OK, we're back. This is the Macrium Reflect rescue disk.
It has most of the operations of the actual program,
except you're running it in a Windows PE environment
instead of Windows 10. What you'll want to do is click the
Fix Windows Boot Problems option, after which you should see a dialog box with
your SSD listed. Hit Next and then click Finish.
After it restores the boot configuration data, go ahead and restart your PC,
which will boot to Windows on the SSD as it did before.
Let's open File Explorer once again and confirm we have our
SSD as our C drive, and the empty hard drive as our E
drive. Reboot multiple times to make sure you can boot to your SSD
repeatedly and reliably, and make sure to keep your rescue disk in a handy place,
just in case you need it in the future.
I hope you enjoyed! - thanks for watching.