Today, we're going to use the latest
version of Macrium Reflect Free to clone all partitions of a hard
drive to an M.2 SSD, and I'll show you how to keep it
bootable after the clone. In a previously published video, I did
the same thing with an older version of Macrium Reflect Free,
cloning a 1 TB hard drive down to a 360 GB SSD, and successfully
rebooting into the SSD. In this video, I'll go
further in the process by completely wiping the hard
drive after the clone, and I'll answer some common questions
that were raised in the last video, including what to do when
cloning to a larger SSD. Before we start, I do have a disclaimer:
this video was created specifically with the Dell Insprion 5570
in mind, so this procedure may not work for all computers.
At a high level, you need to make sure that your PC or laptop has a way to
change the boot sequence to the SSD drive. Later in the video, I'll be showing
you how to completely erase the contents of the hard drive, which is
always a risky operation. Make sure you back up any critical
data, and you may even want to create a backup image of the entire
disk. With that said, I'm starting with an out-of-the-box 5570 laptop in which
I've already installed a brand new 360 GB M.2 SSD module. If you're
interested, you can visit my previous tutorial that
describes the process of installing the ssd. My
intent is to use the SSD as my boot drive, and to wipe
clean the original 5400 RPM 1 TB hard drive so i can use it
as my secondary storage. When you're cloning from a larger
drive to a smaller one, it's not possible to fit, say, 800 GB
of data on the 1 TB hard drive into a
smaller space of 360 GB. If this resembles your situation, you can
always uninstall some programs, or offload data like music and other
media to an external hard drive. If you can reduce it
down to say, 300 GB, the clone will work. Keep in mind that
you may have other smaller partitions, like system or recovery
partitions, that aren't shown on the screen. If we
zoom into the drive, you'll see that the Dell Inspiron supplies five
additional partitions out-of-the-box, each with their own used space. You may
see a different number of partitions depending on your computer.
Since they're so small relative to the size of the main OS partition,
you can copy them over without worrying too much about how much space they take.
When Macrium Reflect actually performs the clone, it will copy
the data, along with the mini-partitions, over to the
destination SSD. When you go from a smaller drive to
a larger one, however, everything will fit fine no matter how
much space is used on the hard drive, but if you just accept the defaults
while cloning, you'll end up with a partition that's the same
size as your old one, wasting a lot of unused space. However,
there is a way to manually expand it, which i'll demonstrate later on.
Before we install Macrium Reflect, let's take a look at our newly
installed SSD in Windows. I'll right-click the Start button,
and select Disk Management. Since the SSD hasn't been initialized,
it will pop up a dialog box prompting you to choose a partition
style, which you can skip for now since Macrium Reflect
will take care of that for us during the clone on-the-fly.
Our goal is to clone Disk 0, which is our slow,
5400 RPM 1TB hard drive, to Disk 1, which is
our fast 360 GB SSD. Let's exit the Disk Management tool and
launch the installed web browser. I'll then search for
Macrium Reflect Free... and after clicking on the first
result that's returned... make sure you download the
free version for Home use, not the trial version. The
free version is truly free, while the trial version has a 30 day
limitation. After clicking Home use, it will prompt you for your email
address, which is entirely optional, after which you'll want to click
Continue. Let's close the Thank You screen, and I'll hit Run
to start the program immediately after it downloads.
When it starts up, you'll see that this is a small stub program that
downloads a much larger setup file. Using the defaults, I'll hit
the Download button... While it downloads, you may have noticed
that the website refers to the same Version 7 of Macrium Reflect
Free as my previous video. However, this is a new build in which
they've made quite a few changes since the last time we downloaded it.
Now that it's finished downloading, the main installer will start.
Let's click Next, which launches the Setup Wizard. Hit Next
again, and after you accept the license agreement and
move to the next screen, select the Home license. The following
step will prompt you to register the software, where you can
enter your email address if you wish, or you can
uncheck the registration box and hit the Next button. Here, we'll
accept the defaults for the install location and the desktop shortcut,
click Next, and finally hit Install to start the actual installation
of the program. Once the installation is complete, we can
click Finish to close out the setup wizard. When the program
launches, you'll see the slow 1 TB drive that
comes with the laptop labeled Disk 1, divided into
six different partitions. The plan, of course, is to
clone all six partitions in the correct order to the SSD,
which is labeled Disk 2. Remember that these were labeled Disks 0
and 1 in the Disk Management tool earlier so don't get confused
about the numbering - Macrium Reflect simply labels
them 1 and 2 instead. Before we start though, you'll need to
create a rescue disk by selecting Other Tasks from the menu,
the Create Rescue Media. Later in this video, I'll use this disk
to restore the Windows boot partition. Just to be clear, this isn't a
backup of any of your data - this is just a way to boot to a Windows
recovery version of Macrium Reflect. I recommend a CD or DVD if possible,
or, if you insert a flash drive, you'll be presented with an option
to create it there. Since I still have a few blank
CDs left over from the 1990s, I'll use a CD to create my rescue disc. Once I hit the Build button,
it will take some time, so I'll take a break to make some
coffee and I'll be right back... OK, we're done. In case you're wondering
about the size of the rescue disk contents, I'll launch File Explorer
and look at the properties of the CD, which indicates
around 533 MB of data. If you're using a USB flash drive,
a 1 GB capacity will be more than enough for a rescue disk. Regardless
of the medium you use, please test it to make sure
you can boot to it, because it will be required later in the video.
So let's start the cloning process. To do so, we'll click Clone This Disk.
This top bar, once again, is labeled Disk 1, which represents
the 1 TB hard drive. The bottom section is where we'll select the
destination, which is the new SSD labeled Disk 2. You should
see a blank, gray box since it's an empty, unallocated
disk. What you'll want to do next is to drag-and-drop these boxes
representing each partition from the source to the destination.
Keep in mind that these boxes aren't to scale; for example, this third
box is where Windows resides and its size is a whopping 918 GB,
while the box right next to it is only 461 MB, or less than
1 GB. In fact, all the partitions other than
the Windows partition are relatively tiny, ranging from
461 MB to the 11 GB range. Let's start dropping partitions to the
bottom. When we get to the third one, you can see we have a problem: it's so
large that it takes all the space of the 360 GB SSD. Macrium
is able to truncate the partition down to 334.59 GB
to make it fit onto the SSD, but then we won't be able to fit the
fourth, fifth, and sixth partitions. So let's remove the
third box clicking Undo, and drag the fourth, fifth, and
sixth boxes instead. What remains is 321.89 GB to fill, which we'll
do now with the Windows partition. You can see that Macrium
Reflect has shrunk the partition from 918.04 GB down to 321.89,
using up all the space on the SSD. What I'd
like to do is place the partitions in their original order
of one through six, instead of one, two, four, five,
six, three, as shown here. This is because the partition number
may be important for some recovery environments. Unfortunately,
I haven't found this to be the case with Dell's SupportAssist, but
I'll show you a solution for restoring from the recovery partition
in a future video, even when SupportAssist
can't detect it. At any rate, the easiest way to keep the original
order is to write this number down - the size of the truncated Windows
partition. I'll then remove this partition with the Undo button, as well
as partitions six, five, and four. Since we have partitions one and two in the
correct order, I'll simply drag and drop the third one down again,
and then click Cloned Partition Properties. This is where
you can manually change the size of the partition on the
cloned drive. In the partition size box, let's type in the
number that we wrote down earlier: 321.89, and
click OK. We can now drag down four, five, and six, which are guaranteed
to fit the SSD perfectly. But what if you're going from a
smaller disk to a larger one? For instance, let's assume
you're going from 1 TB to 2 TB. You'll want to follow
the same procedure, dragging down one, two... skipping
the Windows partition, and dropping four, five, six, and then
three. Notice that the last partition doesn't expand-
to-fit even though we saw that it will shrink-to-fit. What
you'll need to do is click the Cloned Partition Properties link, and
then hit the Maximum Size button... and change the units to GB,
which will give you a number in the partition size box: 1849.551.
Write this number down, and I'll go ahead and close this out,
and using the Undo button, remove partitions three, six, five, and
four... and then resume our partition sequence with number three. Click
Clone Partition Properties again... make sure your units are correct...
and enter the number we discovered earlier: 1849.551... and hit
OK. Once again, drop the boxes in order, and we're guaranteed to fit
within the space of the SSD. OK, so that was going to a larger SSD;
let's get back to our demonstration for going to a smaller SSD. After
you have your partitions set, you'll want to click the Next button. Here,
you can schedule the clone again in the future, but in our case, we're
only doing this once, so I'll skip it by hitting Next. This takes
us to the Summary screen, which lists every operation
that will be performed, and where we can click the Finish button.
Finally, we'll choose the option to Run the Backup Now, and uncheck
the box to save or schedule the definition as an XML, since
we're only doing this once. Once we click OK, the cloning
process will start, which can take quite some time. I'll go
ahead and take another break to brew a second cup of coffee... OK, we're back. The clone took
approximately 45 minutes, but your mileage may vary. Opening
up File Explorer, the C drive, which is the hard drive, has been
cloned to F, which is the SSD. In fact, when I click on both drives,
we can see that the folder structures are identical. I'll go ahead and close
File Explorer, Macrium Reflect, and the browser, and finally
hit the Start menu in order to reboot my machine, so I can
make some changes to the BIOS. As soon as you see the Dell splash
screen, you'll want to hit the F2 key, which allows you to enter the BIOS setup
screens. This is where we'll swap the hard drive and the SSD such
that the system boots to the SSD. Go ahead and hit Boot
Sequence on the left hand menu, where you'll discover an entry
for the SSD that wasn't there before. You'll want to
click on that entry, then hit the up button to move it into
first place above the hard drive. We can now Apply the settings, where
I'll Save as Custom Settings, hit OK, and then Exit,
which reboots the machine. You may or may not see a blue
screen. If it does pop up, this will be the only time
you see it. Simply Continue and after a while, you'll be taken
directly to Windows. You should notice that it starts up much
quicker since it's using Windows on the SSD. To prove that
we're on the SSD, I'll launch File Explorer, where you
can see that my C drive is now the 360 GB SSD, while the E
drive is my old 1 TB hard drive. This is where
my previous video about Macrium Reflect ended. I'm
now going to complete the process and wipe out the hard drive
so that I can use it as a fresh, empty drive for secondary storage.
What you'll want to do is hit the Start button and type CMD. Right-click
on the resulting command prompt link and choose
Run as Administrator. You'll then need to type diskpart
to start Microsoft's Disk partition utility. To list
all the disks in your system, type list disk,
which shows you the hard drive labeled Disk 0, and the
SSD labeled Disk 1. Since we want to wipe the hard drive, I'm
going to type select disk 0, and if I list disk again i can
confirm that Disk 0 is indeed selected by observing
the asterisk next to it. I'll then wipe the disk by typing clean...
but be very careful using this command, because it will erase your hard drive
without prompting you for additional information. Make absolutely
certain that you've selected the disk that
represents your old original hard drive. On my computer, it's
Disk 0, but it may be different on yours. After you press
Enter, diskpart will completely wipe your hard disk,
including all partitions on it. In fact, you'll notice in the
background that the E drive disappears from File Explorer. To
create a new partition on the hard disk, right-click on the Start menu
and select Disk Management. It will then prompt you to initialize the
disk, where you can keep it as a GPT disk, which is the default, and click
OK. At the bottom, you should see a box for Disk 0 that
indicates an unallocated disk. Right-click the box and select
New Simple Volume, which launches a wizard. Hit Next,
specify how large you want the volume - I'll just keep it at the maximum
size so I can have one large 1 TB partition - and click Next.
We'll click Next again to keep the default letter assignment,
and finally, I'll enter a name for the volume label - let's call it "Data"
and hit Next. We'll click Finish to complete the wizard, after
which it will create a brand new empty E drive, as you can see
when I click back on File Explorer. But we're not finished yet -
there's one more step to take, and that is to boot to the rescue disk.
If you've removed the CD that we created earlier, insert it back into its tray,
or insert the USB flash drive. I'll go ahead and close out all windows,
and get ready to restart the machine. Once you see the Dell logo, you'll want
to hit the F12 key, which is the one-time boot menu. Using the down
arrow key, choose your rescue disk, which in my
case is the DVD drive. Press any key to boot to the CD, and
since it takes a while to boot, I'll take a break and grab a third
and final cup of coffee... OK, we're back. This is the Macrium
Reflect rescue disk. It has most of the operations
of the actual program, except you're running it in a
Windows PE environment instead of Windows 10. What
you'll want to do is click the Fix Windows Boot Problems option, after
which you should see a dialog box with your SSD listed. Hit
Next and then click Finish. After it restores the boot configuration
data, go ahead and restart your PC, which will boot to Windows
on the SSD as it did before. Let's open File Explorer once
again and confirm we have our SSD as our C drive, and the
empty hard drive as our E drive. Reboot multiple times to make
sure you can boot to your SSD repeatedly and reliably, and make sure to
keep your rescue disk in a handy place, just in case you need it in the future. I hope you enjoyed! - thanks for watching.
