Clone a Windows 10 Hard Drive with Linux - Laptop SSD Upgrade.

hey guys CJ here with elevated systems so do you have an older or maybe a budget laptop like this one that's running like pond water well many you know one of the easiest fixes to speed up a slow laptop is to replace the stupidly slow mechanical hard drive with a much faster SSD now while physically swapping the hard drive is pretty easy and straightforward the part that scares most people off from doing this is the prospect of cloning the hard drive I mean I'm sure all your files and programs and well operating system is on the drive after all and you probably want access to all that and unfortunately Windows doesn't make it easy to clone itself so today I'm going to show you how to clone your hard drive to an SSD using a Linux operating system now this method will use free software however you will need two pieces of hardware to accomplish this the first is a simple USB flash drive with at least four gigabyte capacity and the second is an external drive enclosure you will only need this if you don't either have a second drive bay in your laptop or maybe a secondary desktop computer with at least two open SATA ports for this video we'll assume that the one laptop is all you got and we'll be using the external drive enclosure you can pick one of these up for as little as nine bucks the one I'm using I've had from years it can accept 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch drives and it sells on Amazon for about 23 bucks also if you buy one of these external drive enclosures you have the added benefit of being able to use your old drive as an external storage device once you're done cloning it so let's start with determining if a slow hard drive is the source of your problems to do that I'm gonna just boot up the laptop and gracefully through the magic of editing we can speed through this because this laptop really does run like molasses in January as soon as I'm able to enter the desktop I'll launch the task manager at the moment the CPU is doing all the heavy lifting but wait for it there now our disk has immediately pegged out at 100% and if I sort this you can see there's very little going on to be tasking this so much what we're looking at is the data transfer rate of the drive not the storage space in fact the drive is only about 20% full but that doesn't matter because the drive isn't able to handle the insignificant amount of data transfer as background processes an attempt to launch making it the bottleneck for the entire system right now okay so the system is fully booted and our drive seems ok now but let's do something as simple as launch Chrome and again we're bottlenecked so right there is enough to prove that our drive is the reason this laptop runs slower than an asthmatic snail but let's collect some benchmark data so we have some numerical data to compare after we get a new SSD installed I'm going to use crystal disk to measure the disk read and write speeds just one run for times sake and some fast forward action and the results now you can see our sequential read and write speeds well are bad but better than what we saw on task manager and that's because real-world applications the system is accessing your reading to drive more randomly and you see those numbers well they just suck so let's get some software to clone this drive I've already got the site pulled up and I'll put links in the description for you the first app we need is Rufus which will allow us to create a bootable USB Drive so let's download the latest version okay now we can just launch it there's no real installation process for this application but we do need something to write to the usb so let's go get our Linux distro today I'm going with a boon - you can use any Linux distro you would like really but my assumption is that if you're watching this video you probably aren't thoroughly familiar with Linux so I picked up a boon tube because it's probably the most popular distro and I know it runs great as a live USB it's pretty universally compatible with most hardware also and just like saying a boot do we want to download the desktop version and the most current LTS version which at the time of this video is 18.0 4.3 this download will take a little longer so while it's downloading I'm going to prepare the new SSD what we need to do is initialize the disk so it can be tected by our Linux OS now we can do this in Windows or in a boon too but again you're probably most familiar Windows so let's launch the disk management utility just type in disk management a drive partition in the search bar and it'll show up once it launches it should automatically detect we have a drive that needs to be initialized select Master Boot Record as the partition style and click OK now you should have a new unallocated partition if the format partition dialog pops up you can select do not format as all will be taken care of when you clone the drive now I just noticed something that could cause problems looking at my primary partition on my hard drive I noticed that its encrypted with BitLocker the cloning method we're going to use will copy the drive exactly bit by bit and the new drive will also be encrypted however once I'd clone the drive BitLocker will be triggered so I'll need the BitLocker key which I have if your drive is encrypted either ensure you have your key available before you clone or my recommendation is to disable and decrypt the drive prior to cloning in some cases even though you essentially have an exact copy of the drive after the cloning process the fact that it's a different drive sometimes messes with the security and your key is not recognized the easiest way to disable BitLocker and decrypt the drive is through the command prompt simply type CMD into the search bar now select run as administrator now type in the following command manage - be de space - o FF space C : or the drive letter of the encrypted drive hit enter the drive should begin decrypting however there's no status indicator here so to see the progress type the following command managed - B de space - status hit enter if the drive is stroke decrypting it will look something like this if it's complete it'll look like this okay blues downloaded so let's create our bootable USB back in Rufus we want to select our USB stick for boot selection select free Dass and then click select navigate to your boon to download location and select the ISO file all other settings should stay at the fault as seen here and if your status says ready just click start you may see a dialog box to get some additional files click yes then select ISO image mode double check your writing to the correct source your USB stick and select ok some fast forward action and we have a bootable USB Drive time to launch a boom - now many laptops default to the USB source for booting so you might just be able to restart your system with the USB stick installed and it'll do its thing if not you'll need to access your UEFI or BIOS to change your boot options now all UEFI menus are different so if you're unfamiliar with yours refer to your users manual I can't demonstrate every menu type however I can show you your way around the BIOS that usually works for most systems just do a ctrl alt delete then click down on the power icon on the bottom right now holding shift click restart this will bring up your Advanced Options now you can select use a device and then select USB now your system should restart and boot using the USB stick if for some reason it doesn't work you can do the same thing again control-alt-delete shift hold restart this time select troubleshoot then advanced options then UEFI firmware settings now when you click restart your system where we start into BIOS menu where you can change your boot options if you get through that and boot it off the USB stick eventually the abouttwo dialog will pop up you want to be sure to select try abloom - we don't want to install it to the disk and voila you're not running a Linux OS congratulations as exciting as that is let's get to work first thing we need to do is click down here and bring up your applications and startup gparted we're going to use this utility determine exactly which drive is our image file or the old hard drive we want to clone and our output file or the new SSD we're cloning to now Linux names drives a bit different than you're probably used to if you click on this drop down you can see the drives recognized by the OS we have SD a SD b + SD c looking at SD a we see it's a one terabyte drive and it contains a microsoft partition so this is our image file so let's write that down is equals four slash de v 4 / SD a now we have another 1 terabyte drive which should be our SSD and we see the unallocated partition recreated earlier so let's write this down Oh F equals 4 / de B 4 / s D B once we're sure if I Drive let's close gparted and then find the terminal from here we're going to initiate the duplicate disk or DD command this one simple line will do all the work of cloning our drive but you need to ensure you do it correctly because entering the wrong input or output file can wipe their hard drive so be sure you identified your drives correctly ok let's get into the command it starts with sudo which is Super User do which gives us elevated access in space then DD our duplicate drive command and then a space and then I F equals this is our image file or old hard drive that we want to clone I identified that as for /de v4 slash SDA however you use the label you identified as your input file space now Oh F this is the output file or the new SSD mine was for slash de v4 slash SDB again you input the label for your output file now another space and status equals progress this will allow you to see the cloning process without this command you'll just see a blinking cursor leaving you wonder did I screw up anyway when you're positive you have everything entered correctly it entered and the cloning process will begin now I provided the command in the description below so you can just cut and paste it and edit it with the correct drive label but how can you do that you wonder you're probably watching this video on a phone or another computer as you're following along well that's another benefit of using a boot - it's a full and complete operating system so you can simply launch the web browser jump on youtube and bring up this very video now you have the commands to copy man I have two views it's a win-win in any case depending on your drive size and transfer rate this could take a long time in fact for me it's now 24 hours later cloning a one terabyte drive through USB 2 yeah it takes that long especially when you trip on the drive and close your power cord when it's about 200 gigabytes in anyway when it's done it will look like this so let's get back into G part didn't take a look first thing we see is we have some unused space which is okay as our new SSD was slightly larger than the old hhd I'll show you how to manage that back in Windows but it does bring up a good point you can use this method exactly as I showed you to clone a drive of equal size or larger however if you need to clone a drive to a smaller one it can be done but there are a few more steps now why would you want to do that why would you want to step down to a smaller drive well I've actually done this a few times for people who are upgrading from a large hard drive to something like a dual drive system where they have a smaller MDOT to drive as their boot drive and then another or secondary cestia or hard drive as their storage drive this method is a little more complicated and I'm not really going to get into it in this video if there's a demand for it and maybe I'll do it in a later video today you can see our original drive SDA and now our cloned SSD are identical except for that 22 gigabytes of extra space now we can shut down a boon too so let's get this drive swapped out now unless you have the exact Dell Inspiron 15 3000 series laptop it's kind of pointless for me to walk you through the process of tearing this thing down and swapping out the drives so I'm just gonna speed through it [Music] [Applause] [Music] just like that now if you have no idea how to swap out drives you could probably find a tutorial on your exact system but seeing as you found this video you're probably way ahead of me anyway let's fire this thing up and see if it works so far so good let's login this is definitely moving a lot faster I almost missed it there but we can see already the CPU has completed its boot tasks and now the disk isn't maxed out in fact it looks like the boot tests are complete so let's launch Chrome again there's a bit more disk usage now but not like before and zero bottlenecking okay that alone proves a pretty good point but let's get our after numerical data with crystal disk start that up and time warp wow that looks a whole lot better let's throw up a side-by-side and I'll just let the numbers do the talking here mission accomplished that's it for today's video hopefully this makes my wife happy as she should be able to get through her school work a lot faster and hopefully you learned something that's always my primary goal if you have a question ask in the comments below I'll answer if you like this video you know what to do and the best way you can support a small channel like mine is by subscribing you can also learn more about me and my channel over here as well as check out some other videos and until next time have a great week

Channel: Elevated Systems

Views: 57,448

Keywords: hhd, ssd, computers, clone, drive cloning and imaging, laptop upgrade, ubuntu, linux, windows 10, clone windows 10, hard disk, notebook, how to clone ssd, how to copy hard drive, how to clone hard drive, how to move os, how to move os from hdd to ssd windows 10, how to copy ssd, how to copy hdd to ssd, hard disk cloning, new ssd

Id: W74An3pliJI

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019