Need to Upgrade a Friend's OS Drive...How??

I need some help cloning / putting in a new OS drive for a friend please. The last time I can remember cloning a drive was with Norton Ghost running off of a floppy!!

In other words, consider me a total newbie…

He has a HP ENVY 750-247c Desktop PC with Win 10 on it (I assume Home) and his C-drive is full. He’s ordered a Samsung 500 GB Evo 860 for a replacement for his stock 128 GB OS drive.

If I remember right, I need to disconnect all drives but the OS drive. Plug in the new drive where his D drive was, and clone.

That’s my first roadblock: what utility do I use? How do I run it? I remember when HDDs use to come with a utilities CD/Floppy but I doubt that happens anymore. Is don’t even know if his optical drive works… Does Samsung have a utility for this?

I also remember that after cloning, before booting, I pull his old SSD out and plug in the new one in the same port. Yes? And hope everything is fine…

Any and all tips will be appreciate!!!

Part II:

I also remember that to make his old drive usable / conflict free as a thumbdrive, I’ll need to somehow make it inactive as a boot / OS drive.

Can I do this with my Win 7 Pro 64 system by hooking it up with a USB dongle? If so, how? I do have a hot swap SATA bay, but wouldn’t that cause a conflict on my own system? (Beside, my spare SSD won’t work in the hot swap bay; I can use it only as a USB / thumbdrive. So his old drive may not work that way, too.)

Thanks!!.
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There are plenty of free cloning tools you can use and Samsung do have a free one you can't generally clone from Windows you need to boot cloning DVD be sure to clone the disk so you get all partitions

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Macrium Reflect Free wil work just fine for cloning from the old drive to the new on. Samsung's Migration program is somewhat less than stellar. I never was able to clone more than two or three partitions with it. Macrium Reflect, on the other hand, has never failed me when cloning from an HDD to an SSD or HDD (except once when the source drive was corrupted; thank God for backups).

Select Home use: Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free

After cloning, shut down, remove the old SSD and boot from the new one.
Test it for some days. With Macrium Reflect Free, create a disk image and store it on an external disk.

The old one, as it is a boot able drive, it may have some hidden partitions. My suggestion is, to use it as a data drive, open disk manager (C:\Windows\System32\diskmgmt.msc) select the drive, delete all partitions, create new, format as NTFS.

Great :) Thanks! Macrium Free it will be. And thanks for the link: I just downloaded it and will make a boot thumbdrive (I've already Googled it.) I wasn't sure, so I used my email to register it instead of his, but I'll be using it on his machine. I'll assume that's OK.


He'll be bringing the unit over this weekend, and I'll give him the instructions on making the old drive usable. That way he can use it for a few days before wiping it. His is Win 10 but I image disk management is pretty much the same.
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Macrium Reflect Free will successfully transfer all partitions from the 1st drive to the 2nd. Recently I had a blank drive, and I needed to get the system and OEM partitions onto it, so that I could do a factory restore of Windows to that computer. I had an identical computer which had all of that on its hard drive, so I did a Macrium clone-style backup of all partitions, and I then restored the backup to the computer with the blank drive. I then successfully did a factory restore of Windows to the computer from the OEM partition which was now on that computer's hard drive.

Hi All.


Well... things were successful, but not fully. The clone to the new drive was successful, but just before he brought the unit over, Win 10 would not boot. We're guessing that Win 10's latest update went south due to no room on the drive.


We had hoped that after cloning the 120GB drive to the 500GB it would fire up, but no joy. So getting the new drive installed was successful, but that's it. It got late and he had to leave as he lives several towns away.


He let me know that getting it up and running was mostly successful, but still had to reinstall some programs. Fortunately he had all his data (doc, photos, vids, etc) backup so he didn't lose any of that.


Again, thanks for all the help!!

What might have made this a success would have been to insert a big USB flash drive, then try again to do the update. You can tell Windows to use the space on the flash drive during the update process. This should allow the update to successfully install.

After resolving that issue, I would then proceed with the backup/restore to the new drive. My guess (it's only a guess) is that by first resolving the update issue successfully, you would then have success with the backup/restore and subsequent running of Windows 10 from the bigger drive.

Nice tip. I didn't know you could do that with Windows, and I'd imagine my friend didn't either. The last I heard he got it up-n-running.