In a previous guide I had written that one of the ways to speed up the PC and also to get an old computer back fast, is to change the traditional hard disk with an SSD Solid State disk, which is much faster . The problem is to migrate Windows and all the programs to the new SSD disk, without doing a new installation, which is not exactly positive if you have a lot of important data.
Furthermore, it would not be enough to clone the hard disk by copying it to another disk as you normally would, because an SSD disk can never have the same capacity as a normal hard disk and will have a much more limited space capacity (it would cost too much, if it existed, 1 TB SSD). Instead of upgrading to a larger drive, you want to migrate to a smaller drive, which means that a lot of data won't fit on the SSD.
So if you can't or don't want to do a clean install (and reinstall Windows without losing data), you can do a fairly easy migration that shouldn't take more than an afternoon.
In short, what you have to do is make a backup of the hard disk to another disk, delete all personal files, i.e. documents, films, photos and music in order to reduce the space occupied by Windows on the bone. Then clone the hard disk drive to the SSD and erase it. Next, move all user folders containing Documents, Music, photos etc. to the original hard disk and restore all personal files from backup . The result will be a snappy and fast PC with Windows and the programs installed on a solid state disk, instead leaving the normal data in the old hard disk which will act as a secondary disk.
Note : If you are using a laptop, this process is certainly more difficult as you cannot install more than one disk inside it. You will therefore have to sacrifice some space and maybe use an external hard disk to hold fixed data such as photo files, mp3s and videos.
To move Windows to an SSD disk what you need is therefore a desktop computer with internal hard disk with Windows installed, an SSD solid state disk in which the entire installation will be brought, and a backup disk that can be an external USB drive or even a memory. The SSD disk must be at least the total amount of the hard disk minus the space occupied by the user folder .
To discover this space, you can right click on the C: \ Users \ folder and read, in the properties, how much space its content occupies. From the My Computer you can see instead the non free space of the C drive:
Obviously the SSD should be a little bigger than this for future updates and new programs. It is assumed that, for the purposes of this guide, the new SSD hard disk has already been installed inside the computer (see also the guide for installing a second hard disk).
As mentioned above, it is now necessary to make a backup of the data to another external drive or drive in order to save all personal data: documents, music, images, photos, videos etc. Since it is not possible to clone only a part of a disk, it is necessary to remove these files to compress the data to be transferred.
As a program to perform the migration you can use the usual EASEUS Todo Backup Free, free and already mentioned among the best programs to clone the disk to make a backup as a system image.
It is easy to use, free, and can clone partitions from a large disk to a smaller drive, which is the most important thing for this process (since an SSD disk is probably smaller than the normal hard disk). This guide assumes that the main hard drive also has a single partition with Windows and personal files inside.
If you had a computer configured in dual boot with Linux, OS X, or another version of Windows on the same drive, this whole process would become a little more complicated.
In step three, you will have to click on the Windows partition and clone only the one in the SSD instead of the entire hard disk. After phase three, there will probably be problems starting Windows from the SSD because the Windows bootloader is missing. Then, after migrating to the SSD, you will need to insert the Windows installation CD (or the Windows 8 recovery disc) and choose " Repair your computer " from the main screen to repair the bootloader.
To migrate, transfer and move your Windows installation to an SSD drive follow the steps below
1) Connect the SSD to a free SATA socket inside the computer.
Keep the computer case open during the entire migration.
2) Defrag and data backup
Turn on the PC and defragment the disk: click on the Start menu, type "defrag", open the Disk Defragmenter and perform defragmentation. If you are using Windows 8 this is not necessary. Then back up the data to an external disk by making a safe copy (you can use the internal Windows backup utility). In the backup, include the entire C: / Users / Username folder
3) Delete the files from the main drive so that it becomes small enough to fit on the new SSD disk. This means that if the SSD is 120GB and the current drive has 360GB of data, 240GB of minimum needs to be deleted. Usually, this is done by deleting all the music, movies, documents and photos (without deleting the folders themselves, only their contents). If that's not enough, check the more spacious programs and uninstall them.
See here how to check the space occupied on a disk.
4) Copy and move Windows to SSD solid state drive
Open EASEUS Todo Backup and choose the "Clone" button from the left sidebar.
Click on "Clone disk", choose the current drive where Windows is installed and then select the SSD disk as the destination disk.
At the same time, select the "Optimize for SSD" option to ensure that the partition is properly "aligned" and get the best performance from the SSD. Click Next and let Easus copy the disc. If it says that the source drive is too large, then not enough data has been deleted. If you choose to migrate a partition and not the entire disk, instead of choosing "Clone disk", you have to click on "Clone Partition". Keep in mind that all of this works if you clone the entire disk and not a single partition.
If you had two or more partitions, you need to unify them from Windows Disk Management.
5) Boot from SSD
Once the cloning process is complete, turn on the computer again, start it and check that everything is working.
Respect the PC and in the case inside the computer, disconnect the SATA sockets and connect the cable of the main hard disk on the SSD.
Leaving, for now, the main hard disk detached, start the computer.
If all goes well, Windows is loaded normally by the cloned SSD without noticing the change .
6) Reconnect the hard disk
Turn off the PC, reconnect the old hard disk with the SATA socket left free without touching the SSD anymore. Turn on the PC, enter the BIOS and change the boot order making sure that the SSD is booted as a disk (see guide to change the boot order of the computer ). If all goes well, the old hard drive will be seen as a secondary drive and can therefore be used to restore all previously saved data. You can also delete the Windows folder from this disk that we no longer need (but better when you are sure that everything works).
5) Move user folders
Now that Windows has been migrated to the SSD with all programs, to save space, user folders must be moved.
Go to all the folders located inside C: / Users / username- and, for each of them, press the right mouse button, enter the properties and change the path by putting, instead of C, the secondary disk that will have a other letter (visible from computer resources). Do this for all the various contact folders, desktops, downloads, favorites, links, documents, music, images, videos, saved games.
7) Activate AHCI
AHCI is the way to optimize the use of an SSD drive. It must be activated on Windows first and then on the BIOS (in the SATA Configuration options). Search Google for the guide to activate AHCI Mode.
An alternative and automatic program for cloning Windows to SSD is AOMEI Backupper, free. After moving Windows to the SSD connected as a secondary disk, just turn off the computer, open it and then disconnect the primary hard disk and connect the SSD in its place. The hard disk can then be installed as a secondary disk.
Once this is done, read the following guides:
- Optimize and manage the SSD, solid state memory card
- How to keep the SSD fast and make it last longer
