How To Migrate To A Solid-State Drive Without Reinstalling Windows

Installing a solid-state drive is one of the best upgrades you can make to your computer, but migrating your Windows installation to a small drive can be tricky. Here’s how to install an SSD without reinstalling Windows from scratch.

We’ve shown you how to migrate from an old drive to a spacious new drive, but when migrating to an SSD, things get a little more complicated. Instead of upgrading to a bigger drive, you’re usually migrating to a smaller drive, which means a lot of files — like music, movies and games — might not all fit on the SSD. Luckily, it’s still pretty easy to do, and you should be able to go through the whole process in an afternoon.

Here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to back up everything, and then delete your personal files — like your documents, movies and music — from your current hard drive. This will make your Windows installation small enough to fit on the SSD. We’ll then clone your current drive onto the SSD, and completely erase your current drive. From there, we’ll move all your user folders — like My Documents, My Music, and so on — to the original hard drive, and restore all your personal files from the backup. You’ll then be able to reap the benefits of an SSDs speed while keeping all your documents and files readily accessible on a second drive.

What You’ll Need

There are a number of different ways to go about this, but we’ve found this to be the easiest and most reliable method. Here’s what you’ll need:

  • Your current hard drive, with Windows installed. For simplicity’s sake we’ll call this drive–that is, the drive you’re migrating from — your “current hard drive” throughout the tutorial.
  • A solid-state drive. This is the drive you’ll be migrating to. To get a rough idea of how big it should be, head to your current drive, navigate to C:\Users\ and right-click on your user folder. Hit Properties, and mark down how much space that folder takes up. Head to My Computer and note how much space Drive C: has filled up, and subtract your user folder’s size from C:’s total. That’s how big your SSD needs to be, though I’d give yourself a good deal of wiggle room for future updates and new programs. We’ll assume, for the purposes of this guide, that you’ve already installed your new hard drive and are ready to migrate your data.
  • A backup of all your data. Since you can’t clone only part of a drive, you’ll need to remove your music, movies, and other personal files from your current drive before migrating Windows to the SSD. That means you’ll want to back up your data somewhere else — whether that be an external drive, a spare internal drive, or the cloud. Just make sure that data is safe and recoverable, since we’ll be restoring it later on.
  • EaseUS Partition Master. This is the program we’ll be using to migrate your installation. It’s easy to use, can perform multiple operations at once, and it’s free.

A Note for Dual Booters

This guide assumes your main hard drive only has one partition on it, holding Windows and your documents. If you dual boot with Linux, OS X, or another version of Windows and it resides on the same drive, this whole process becomes a bit more complicated. Make extra sure you have a backup before continuing, and tweak the following two steps to the process:

  1. In step three, you’ll want to click on your Windows partition and clone only that to the SSD instead of cloning the entire disk. Cloning the entire disk would bring all your partitions over, which you won’t likely have room for.
  2. After step three, you probably won’t be able to boot into Windows on your SSD. This is because the Windows bootloader resides on the MBR, not the partition itself. After you’ve migrated to the SSD, you’ll need to insert your Windows installation CD and choose “Repair Your Computer” from the main screen. Choose Startup Repair from the menu, and your computer should reboot a few times and repair the bootloader.

Step One: Back Up Your Data

Before you do anything else, make sure everything is backed up in case something goes wrong. You should already be backing up your data regularly, whether to an external drive or with something like Crashplan, but if you aren’t, now’s the time to start. Run one last backup before you start the migration process to make sure it’s as up to date as possible.

If you don’t have a regular backup, grab a spare hard drive — either internal or external — and start up EaseUS partition Master. Click on your current Windows hard disk in the right-hand pane — where it says “Disk # (MBR)”, not where it says “C:”) — and then click “Copy Disk” in the left sidebar. It’ll analyse the drive; and when it’s done, hit Next.

On the next window, choose your backup disk as the destination. Hit Next. If you currently have data on that drive, it’s about to be erased, so make sure you don’t need any of it. Hit Next until you reach the last window, then h it Finish. Click the “Apply” button in the upper-left hand corner of the EaseUS window, and your computer will reboot and clone your drive. When it’s done, it may reboot one more time, then boot you back into Windows.

Step Two: Slim Down Your Current Drive

The next thing you need to do is delete files from your main drive until it becomes small enough to fit on your SSD. That means if your SSD is 120GB and your current drive has 260GB of data on it, you’ll need to delete 140GB worth of files before you can migrate. Usually, this can be accomplished by deleting all the music, movies, documents, and other files out of your “My Music”, “My Videos”, “My Documents”, and other user folders. Don’t delete the folders themselves, just delete everything inside them. We want to keep the folders intact for later. And remember, we’ll be restoring your files later on, so don’t worry about deleting stuff you still need. Don’t uninstall any programs, unless you want them gone for good — we want to keep these on the SSD so they can benefit from the drive’s speed.

Step Three: Migrate to the SSD

Open up EaseUS Partition Master and click on your current disk in the right pane (that is, the line that says “Disk # (MBR)”). Hit the “Copy Disk” button in the left sidebar. In the next window, choose your SSD as the destination, and hit Next. On the last window, hit Finish, and then hit Apply in the upper left corner of the EaseUS window. It will reboot your machine and copy your Windows installation to the SSD. When it’s done, it may reboot one more time, then boot you back into Windows.

If it tells you the source drive is too big, then you haven’t deleted enough data. Remember that the size of the SSD — say, 120GB — is not the same as how much space will be available on the SSD after formatting. Once you’ve hooked up your SSD, check how much space is actually available and make sure your current drive is using less than that amount of space. Even if your source drive is bigger, EaseUS Partition Master should automatically resize the partitions so they fit on the SSD, as long as your source drive isn’t filled with too much data.

Remember, if you have more than one partition on your original drive, you wan to clone the partition, not the drive (that is, the part that says C:, not the part that says “Disk # (MBR)”) and stick in the repair disc at this point.

Step Four: Wipe Your Original Drive

Reboot your machine and enter your BIOS setup. Usually, this involves pressing the Delete or F2 keys as your computer boots (it’ll say something like “Press DEL to enter setup”). In your BIOS, head to the section labelled “Boot Order” (or something similar) and set your SSD as the first boot device. Save your settings and exit your BIOS, and it should reboot you into Windows. It should look almost exactly like your old setup, though you’ll probably notice it boots up much faster than you’re used to. If it doesn’t find your wallpaper or desktop icons, don’t worry — they’ll come back when we restore your personal files.

Open up Windows Explorer and find your original Windows drive. Right-click on it and hit “Format”. A Quick Format is fine here; we just need to clear off all that old data. Make sure you’re wiping your original Windows drive and not your backup; if you’re unsure, unplug your backup drive first. You don’t want to lose any of your data.

Step Five: Move Your User Folders

Now that you’ve got Windows on your SSD, you need to get all your other files back on your system. You probably don’t have enough room to fit it on your SSD, so we’re going to store them on your old drive. And, since we can remap the locations of your My Documents, My Music, and other user folders, we can put them on a second drive without Windows even batting an eyelash.

First, head into your old drive (which should now be empty) and create a new folder to house all your user folders. I just called mine “Whitson Gordon”. Head into C:\Users\[Your User Name] and you should see all your user folders there. Right-click on each one, hit Properties, and go to the Location tab. Click on the Move button, and choose your newly created user folder as the destination. When you’re done, you might have a few miscellaneous settings folders left over (like .gtkrc-2.0 or .VirtualBox), which you can leave there. Your Contacts, Desktop, Downloads, favourites, Links, Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, Saved Games and Searches folders should all be on your old drive.

Step Six: Restore Your Personal Files

Lastly, we just need to restore all your personal files. Open up your backup — wherever it may be — and drag your documents, music, pictures, videos, and other files back into your “My Documents”, “My Music”, “My Pictures”, and other user folders that you just moved.

Now, your files will be accessible just as they always were. Even though they’re on a new drive, Windows still sees them as your main “My Documents” or “My Music” folders, so you shouldn’t have to change much else. You may have a few programs — the text-based todo.txt is a great example — that still use absolute paths (like C:\Users\Documents instead of just searching your “My Documents” folder), so you may have to tweak a few settings to get everything working properly. For the most part, though, everything should work as it did before, and you should have a much faster computer thanks to the SSD.

The process seems very complicated, but if you follow the steps exactly, the whole migration should go off without a hitch. You’ll have a super fast-booting machine, programs will launch almost instantaneously, and you’ll still have all your personal files easily accessible on another drive. Got your own favourite method or tips for migrating your data? Share them with us in the comments.


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