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Moving Windows To A New SSD Without Reinstalling
A laptop with a hard disk boots in a minute and a half. The same laptop with an SSD boots in fifteen seconds. The upgrade is one of the cheapest ways to make an old computer feel new, and the part people dread is reinstalling Windows, every programme and every setting. You do not have to. OS migration software copies the working Windows from the old drive to the new one, so you boot from the SSD and find everything where you left it.
What Migration Copies
Windows is not a single folder. It is a small boot partition, a recovery partition, the C: drive and a set of records that tie them together. Migrate Windows in DRE Pro copies all of these as a set to the new drive and lays them out so the new drive boots on its own. Your programmes, documents, browser logins, Wi-Fi passwords and the wallpaper you have not changed since 2019 come along, because they all live on C:.
The new drive can be smaller than the old one. Most people move from a 1 TB hard disk that is a quarter full to a 500 GB SSD. Migrate Windows is built to migrate Windows to new drives that are smaller or larger, as long as the used space fits.
Before You Start
- Connect the new SSD. In a laptop with one slot, a USB to SATA cable or an NVMe enclosure costs a few hundred rupees and does the job.
- Check that the used space on the old disk fits on the new one. Empty the Recycle Bin and clear Downloads if it is close.
- Open Drive Health on the old disk. If it shows Warning or Failing, image it first with Make An Image Of A Drive and recover what matters, rather than cloning a sick disk.
- Back up anything irreplaceable anyway. Migration reads the old disk and writes to the new one, but a power cut partway through on a laptop with a dead battery is a bad hour.
- Plug the laptop into power and turn sleep off.
Clone Windows To SSD, Step By Step
- Open Clone Or Migrate A Disk.
- Choose Migrate Windows. Pick the old disk as the source and the new SSD as the destination.
- Read the summary. Everything on the destination will be replaced, so make sure it is the empty new drive and not your external backup.
- Start it and let it finish. The time depends on the used space, not the disk size. Do not use the computer for other work meanwhile.
- Shut down and swap the drives if the SSD is going into the old disk's slot. Then boot. If the computer tries the old disk first, change the boot order in the BIOS.
Clone Or Migrate
The same page offers Clone Entire Disk, which copies a disk to another disk of the same size or larger, every partition exactly as it is. Use that when you are replacing a data disk, or when you want a perfect copy rather than a tidied-up layout. Migrate Windows is for moving a working Windows and is the one that handles a smaller destination. Windows To Image File writes a Windows disk to an image file on another drive, for keeping. For the laptop upgrade, Migrate Windows is the one you want.
After The First Boot
Open This PC and check the new drive shows as C: with the expected free space. Open a few programmes. Then open Drive Health on the SSD and confirm TRIM is enabled, which Windows normally turns on by itself for a drive it recognises as an SSD. Keep the old disk untouched in a drawer for a week or two, until you are sure nothing is missing. After that, put it in an enclosure and use it as a backup drive. It already holds a copy of everything.