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Switch OS from one drive to another?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 24505
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Deleted member 24505

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I am sorting an old machine for someone, he has only has a 80gb hdd, he has just got a 500gb. i do not want to reinstall, so what is the best way to switch the whole lot from the 80 to the 500gb? free if possible.

Thx Tigger
 

sneekypeet

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Clone it. Usually drive makers offer something for free. What drives are in play here?
 
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You can also clone drives using PING or Easeus ToDoBackup. Both are free. It'll clone the whole thing, you'll just have to expand the new unused free space so that it'll become usable. You can do this in the mentioned apps directly or using Windows partition manager (or Easeus Partition Master Free).
 
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Macrium Reflect is my favorite (and it's also free!). It actually lets you skip the separate step of having to expand the partition when you're done... You can do the clone right on the target machine by creating a bootable CD/flash drive (WinPE) and booting right to it. Simply select the source drive, click "Clone this drive", then click "Cloned Drive Properties" and adjust the target partition size as desired. Then click Finish and let it do its thing. You can also image the source drive to a third drive (the image is stripped of space hogs like the page file and hiberfil.sys, and then compressed so the image will be much smaller than the source), and then restore it to the new drive.. This will give you a backup copy to restore from (albeit a snapshot from today unless you take periodic images) if the new drive fails down the road.
 
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Kursah

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+1 to Macrium Reflect, I use it all the time...works amazingly well, and the free version will do just what you need. :toast:
 
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