Cloning C: to mSATA - "Set active"?

Yes, I was waiting for an answer from the person who sold me the computer, in the end he told me not to bother with it.

I had already discovered that I couldn't clone both the reserved partition and C: at the same time, and was nervous about doing the reserved first and then C: because one might overwrite the other.

When I initialised etc the mSATA it could obviously (I thought) not be called C: because that already existed. I assumed I would be able to "re-letter" it.

When the mSATA is up and running as my boot and OS drive, I will repartition the existing 1TB for data only.

You can see in that pic that System Reserved is marked "system". That's an indicator of boot files. You don't see that on A.

I wasn't aware you could not clone 2 partitions simultaneously.

I'd walk through the clone procedure again and see if you can get System Reserved cloned into that 7 GB unallocated space at the end of the SSD.

If that fails, then you can use Easy BCD.

https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

There's may be a tutorial for Easy BCD somewhere on this site.

I'm just succumbing to a depression at the thought of having to take in a lot of instructions in unfamiliar territory. I shall return after a sleep. Thank you both very much.

Well I haven't been sleeping all this time But I decided to start all over again, so I formatted A: mSATA and deleted D: from my 1TB 5400rpm, so's to be able to clone the whole drive.

I've already tried once but cancelled the process when it appeared to be throwing up unknown drive letters, I panicked. After that, the mSATA was nearly all unallocated so I repeated creating a simple volume and formatting as NTFS.

The 800gb space left where D: used to be appears as unallocated. Will the cloning process ignore this space if I select Disk Clone? I have to wonder because of the above 'phenomenon'.

Here's where I am now:

I'm unfamiliar with EaseUS, but I'd expect unallocated space to be ignored.

Why are you using EaseUS rather than Macrium?

I find that last screen shot of EaseUS confusing. Do you think you are cloning both System Reserved and C?

Unclear why you would panic over drive letters. I'd worry about them later.

The only way to know if it works is to complete the procedure and see what happens when it's done--either the new drive boots or it doesn't. Cloning isn't foolproof, but the source drive shouldn't be harmed--so you could re-do it if needed.

ignatzatsonic said:

Why are you using EaseUS rather than Macrium?

I find Macrium very confusing.

I find that last screen shot of EaseUS confusing. Do you think you are cloning both System Reserved and C?

I'm hoping so.

Unclear why you would panic over drive letters. I'd worry about them later.

I wasn't panicking over mere letters that I might end up with, but over drive letters that might be being cloned instead of the ones I needed - had I ticked a wrong box or summat???

The only way to know if it works is to complete the procedure and see what happens when it's done--either the new drive boots or it doesn't. Cloning isn't foolproof, but the source drive shouldn't be harmed--so you could re-do it if needed.

That's exactly what I thought, so I did it, and it doesn't boot still - it's listed in the BIOS under Main but not under Boot.

So I thought I'd do an image with Macrium (I noticed that Britton had suggested this), but it wouldn't let me save it to my preferred laptop because that one only has a C: drive and Macrium said I couldn't have the same something-or-other. Another laptop's D: drive is too small, so I've found a 64GB USB stick and formatted that to NTFS and was about to create the image, but...

When I click Finish in Macrium this mystifying box pops up - who said anything about running a backup, I just want to create an image So I'm stymied again.

An image is a backup. A clone is not.

Saving as an XML file is unnecessary. That's just like a shortcut that would enable you to re-run the procedure at a later date. Like if you were making an image daily or weekly. I never use the XML method. I just walk through the procedure again from the beginning, as you are doing now. So uncheck the XML box and leave "run this backup now checked.

The imaging will then start and will take a few minutes; maybe a half hour or more to a slow USB drive.

Not clear why you are using imaging when Macrium cloning has not failed for you yet.

If you make that image, you will then have to find a way to restore it.

You could not save the image file to C because C is what you are imaging. You must save the image file to a location OTHER THAN the partitions being imaged. So you are using the USB.

It's done. I think it was OK all the time, if only I'd known how to change the boot order in BIOS. Something about BBS priorities, not where I was looking at all.

Just for the record (in case anyone reads this thread and wonders what I did in the end), that's via clone with EaseUS.

Thank you both for the time you've given me.