How to Migrate Windows to Another Drive 

What software do you use? Drop us a LIKE 👍👍

11/04/2024: For anyone struggling and saying windows is still booting up from your old drive do the following: (Stop watching this vid at 9:15 for now) Go into your BIOS when you boot up your pc, normally this can be done by spamming "delete" key on your keyboard as soon as you turn it on. Once it turns on and your in your BIOS. Select your new drive as the Boot drive. Make it the number #1 option. You should see a dropdown or something which has your original SSD/HDD as the boot option #1. Change that #1 option to the new drive you put windows onto. I had to do this and worked perfectly, hope this helps!

Just wanted to upgrade my SSD, but had no idea how to migrate everything over, and was absolutely losing my mind for 3 hours trying to get this thing figured out because every other guide and thing I was looking up was basically unhelpful. You sir are a life saver! Everything went smooth and perfectly, and I now have plenty more storage space!

I just upgraded my SSD and spent the last few hours trying to find a good video on how to do that and yours is is by far the BEST I've seen man ur a legend. 👍

Just built a new with some of the latest hardware and expanded memory. There are a ton of migrate videos out there that for me I would be woefully unprepared for. This video is quick, easy, and works! Took 10 minutes! The one micro step that was missed is that you do need to drop into BIOS on reboot and change boot disc parameters. Thank you sir!

I simply cannot thank you enough man. I've been trying to do some computer gymnastics to put my old ssd onto my hdd then to my new ssd and its worked like a charm. I simply cannot commend you enough.

This process has been very confusing to me as a fairly novice PC user. I really appreciate the way you lay it all out and make it very accessible! Thank you!

Best guide on RU-vid covering this subject hands down. I’ve been holding off on upgrading my puny 128gb c drive because I had no clue how to transfer the data. Saw this video yesterday morning and thought the guide was so well made that I actually had a chance at doing it myself. Got the new nvme and transfer kit this evening and did everything in 20 minutes, no hiccups and I now have 1.8 TB to play with. You’re a life saver man. Much love from NY

Excellent, easy to follow video. I used your video to migrate my maxed out 2.5" ssd to an NVME M.2 ssd. Worked perfectly. Thanks for the instructions!

I, like many others, just wanted to upgrade my ssd and had no idea the struggle I was in for. Hours were spent downloading different softwares to no avail. This video is a life saver. Thank you so much for making a working video.

As others said, very simple, quick, and precise instructions which were easy to follow. Thank you for the assistance! Dropping a like for sure.

Amazing tutorial. Thanks for making this 👍🏼 took me hours of searching yesterday and got nowhere other than a version of windows on my new drive without the capability to boot from it. Following this I migrated in less than 30 minutes and can now enjoy my new 2 TB NVMe SSD. Thank you!!!!

I would just like to say a massive thank you for your video. Very helpful and easy to understand 👍

Great video. Updated my system from an ssd to an nvme with this method. Followed all the steps you did and had no problems! thanks!

Anytime I have an issue or get stumped, I can always come here to get the answers with video on how to ! I really appreciate all you do and you've helped so much ! ! Thank you so much

Thank you so much for such a great tutorial. I got lost after I mitigated the drive, and needed to clean everything off but i just needed to watch the rest of the tutorial. So clear and thank you for showing multiple ways of doing the task. Thanks!

Great video. Exactly what I was looking for after struggling with so many other videos/programs.

I cannot express my gratitude to you enough. I've tried and tried to clone my boot ssd for the past few days and nothing worked. Macrium had errors, clonezilla didn't boot, easeus was garbage and Samsung's failed at the last hurdle. I was seriously considering doing a fresh install and manually moving everything across, but was worried about moving the appdata folder and program files since they might break. Thankfully your video was able to save me the trouble.

Awesome guide, been trying to do this for ages but never was able to figure out how to do it without messing up my storage until now. Was really easy to follow thanks to your instructions very usefull.

This is for anybody struggling with their MSI Bios 5 freezing! Go to advanced settings (F7), motherboard settings/config, boot, BBS priorities, and change the boot option #1 to the NEW drive you are using, and set boot option #2 to disabled (you'll notice it's your old C: drive before selecting disabled), hit F10 and then yes. Do this after following the video to about 9:30. This stopped my bios from freezing and actually saved the new drive as the boot drive, hope this helps at least one of you internet peeps out there, much love!

Absolute legend, thank you! Everything worked successfully, and my boot up is WAY faster now.

Simple, concise and very well explained. I was able to follow this and do everything in one shot. Awesome video

amazing tutorial, quick and to the point yet covers all possible bases. this will be very useful when my SSD comes in soon

phenomenal video my man, worked like a charm! thank you!!! super easy to understand, well spoken and well-explained guide.

Straight to the point, great explanation and a solution that actually works. Great tutorial man, you have my respect.

Congrats! Straight to the point and "step by step".

Just a message of thanks for your videos given the grief you’ve been receiving. They’re really clear and informative & you’ve been my ‘go to’ for pc stuff on YT for years. Cheers from Oz

I’d been incredibly nervous about cloning my hard drive but this video made it super easy. No issues whatsoever which is completely unlike my usual experiences! Thank you so much. Now I actually have some space on my C drive!

Thank you for explaining everything as simple yet detailed enough as possible for everyone to understand. This tutorial really made everything a whole lot easier for me. So thank you for this!

Wow That was actually effortless. I expected some troubleshooting, but nothing. Great tool and great guide

Brilliant, fantastic tutorial. Especially appreciated all the extra bits towards the end about deleting the old partition and hiding the system reserve. Cheers!

Brother you just saved me from hours more of hassle 😊 You just don't comprehend how much you've helped people with this video unknowingly

Fast, easy and straight down to it, thanks!!

This is easy to follow! Very helpful, man. Thanks for your guide. 🙌🏽

Great tutorial, everything worked! Thank you so much, my old ssd was always so full (it was tiny) and it was a constant struggle! You made my day! Thx!

Thank you. Was messing with stuff following guides and trying to everything with built in Windows tools. This took about 20 minutes and is just done with no hiccups or anything.

In South Africa as an technician i useally use macrium refelct,diskgenius,aomei and ease us todo backup when it was still free but i must say never knew about this one. I also enjoy your videos and have found a couple of stuff on here that helped me alot with much love from South Africa

Having the tool itself is one thing, but knowing how to use it is another thing. Well explained and this is probably the fastest way to OS migration. All in one material: - how to prepare an SSD, - what program to use, - how to use it, - and how to tidy up in Explorer after all this. Thanks a lot 🍾

I've been losing my mind for a morning and an afternoon trying to migrate my OS to my new SSD, 5 defrent softwares I tried and all didnt work. Youre a LIFE-SAVER!

I have been using CloneZilla booted from USB. Nice to be outside of Windows when copying data you also do not face the disk in use issue.

Thank you for your video! Finally, someone explaining how to do clone the drive without promoting the software. After cloning the drive make sure to boot from your new drive, and it will get assigned as the C drive. Check your BIOS setting to boot from the correct drive.

I thought I was going to either have to pay for some fancy app or manually reinstall everything, upgraded my nvme and left the old one as backup in an hour, still can't believe it. You made my day sir. I'm subscribing. Huge thanks!

Best description I found, worked flawlessly. You're the GOAT for this bro, thank you!!

Thanks for the great video. Just one doubt: After selecting restart - do we need to enter bios in that reboot straight away and select the new drive as default boot disk? Or this boot order must be configured beforehand? Thank you.

Thanks Brian. The MiniTool Partition Wizard is a great option. I'm most familiar with the Macrium software, which basically has some of the same functionality.

Thanks so much for this video. The advice to download the older version of this software was the critical piece I was missing. Top notch step by step instructions as well. You're a life saver.

Thank you so much! I was so confused watching other videos but you made it so easy for me to understand! You’re a life savior!

The last time I had to migrate, I ended up using the free version of DiskGenius. It did a better job than many "free" apps that were little more than time wasting demos, and had more features than any of them too. One that really stood out is the support for Shadow Copy to clone a live install. Once it's done, just reboot into the BIOS to swap drive order and you're good to go with minimum downtime. The Shadow Copy feature in Windows has been around for years and is used by some drive imaging tools, so why more cloning utilities don't use it is beyond me. Unfortunately, DiskGenius isn't without flaws. Some of the options don't seem to work well and a few others such is disk imaging are only demos. I couldn't get the MBR to GPT conversion to work and the error message gave no indication what the problem was. At least the vague errors from the Windows MBR2GPT tool helped me sort out the issues. When MBR2GPT finally said it could do it, DiskGenius still gave the same obtuse error. I ended up having boot from a Windows recovery disk and use MBR2GPT to complete the conversion. That said, the free options that do work are still better that what's offered by many free apps, or even paid ones. If the paid version of DiskGenius wasn't quite so pricey, I would consider upgrading.

The drawback for me using Minitools free version 10 was that it created it's own branded recovery tool that appears on boot ; the Windows recovery /disc repair menu wasn't available. It took some time finessing the boot menu (Win 10 )so that the Minitools Recovery option wasn't the first option to boot - not very good if it restarts in recovery automatically after a power outage . Also since the boot screen is replaced before Windows can load, you may be faced with the incredibly poor illegible Minitools graphic at boot.

This video is the GOAT! Any search for migrating windows to a new drive always tries to get you to buy some service, so this video is a nice change of pace.

Finally after 10 hour of trying and watching different videos, this video came to my searching and helped me reach the goal of fixing my ssd so I could boot with an operation system. THANKS ALOT BRO

Hi! Really good video, such a straightforward process and really easy to follow along. However, I came across a problem in my case :(. In the middle of copying partitions, after doing the first restart, the whole thing either froze or got stuck at 0%. I left it for almost 3 hours and nothing changed so I had to force shutdown my laptop, i tried it a couple more times, even went to other videos with different software, but all of it just seems to freeze at some point during the process or not start the process at all. Is this an underlying issue with my device? The old hdd? or the new ssd?

Depending on which SSD brand you buy, most if not all have their own migration software they use. Samsung have one (for their EVO drives), Crucial have their own too (Acronis). The software is free to use and full features enabled provided you have one of their drives installed (regardless of which drive you're migrating to). Generally, I use Acronis True Image when I'm migrating. It works for any drive and as long as you don't have more than four partitions on the old drive, you can use it for free to migrate your old drive the new one (that would be Windows, EFI, Restore and backup partitions). And as always, back your personal files up on another drive. I also keep the old drive too until you know the new drives working correctly. And if you only have one drive slot, you can always put the SSD into an enclosure, hook it up to a USB port and image it that way.

best tutorial out there for this! windows was still on my old hdd tried to do this before but seemed too complicated. this was very easy, much appreciated!

Thank you so much @Britec09, this was a huge time saver when upgrading C drive from 1TB to a 2TB drive. Thank you again!

Thanks for the tip there! In case the storage is soldered to a motherboard. A free tool called Macrium Reflect can help image the source disk, boot the recipient system with PE, and restore the disk image. The non-commercial version is free to use and has its own Bootable media creation tool.

I saw one detail, that isn't really a problem, but it's worth mentioning: Your old system was based on the MBR. Despite you selected GPT for your new NVME, the wizard switched it back to MBR during the copying procedure. As mentioned, it isn't really a technical problem, but MBR has some limitations and disadvantages to GPT.

Tried different other softwares to have my old hdd to be cloned to my new ssd with the OS in it. But they don't clone the boot file. I tried this tip for the last time before I gave up hope. And yes, it worked. Thanks a million for recommending the right software and guiding on how to go about it. Thanks again 😊

I have watched a lot of tutorials on migrating OS to SSD but everything leads to the minitool partition wizard that hou need to purchase. You're video is very helpful and is worth sharing. You earned a subs from me. Thank bruh

This is a very good tutorial for several reasons. It introduces a handy tool for migrating drives for free. Second, i had never heard the term NVMe until now. When I got my bespoke Ryzen PC built a few months ago, the local computer shop (small one-man band) recommended using an SSD for the boot drive. I was initially dubious. I've been using hard drives for 25 years. But the guy explained how much faster the new PC would boot, so I agreed and he installed a 256GB ADATA SX6000 PRO M.2 SSD. The PC boots very fast indeed, but the boot drive is filling up with new software* and although it's still only using about 25% of capacity I can see a time when I may need to get a larger boot drive. Having used other backup software for years, much of it not user-friendly, i was dreading the migration. But with this Minitool (old version) I have complete confidence that it will work when the time comes. But since I don't know how long the 10.1 version will remain available for download, I'm going to download it today and keep it somewhere safe. Finally, the quality of this video is excellent. It is completely comprehensible. * I use a *lot* of applications and the default installation path is nearly always C:\Program Files (or the WOW path for 32-bit programs). Of course, I realise that I can change the default and place new installations on another drive and I have started doing this. But Windows 10 in the process of maintenance and updates seems to chuck a lot of stuff on to the boot drive without asking!

My computer stopped at 00:13 seconds and it’s been like that for 10 mins now. Did it freeze??

This guy right here is the goat. Simple explanation and easy to follow step by step plus his voice is calm really sooth my mind while following this tutorial. The key word is "Migrate" sorry but English is not my main language. It take me about 2 days to find this video very helpful. Save me the money to send it to a store to pay someone else to do it. Just under an hour I follow this video is really that simple. Keep in mind don't be afraid to try

Thanks so much man. This video was so painless in transferring over from an old ssd to a nvme drive. I was nervous but it only took 10 minutes. Thanks again.

The best cloning software is Samsung's data migration wizard. It's able to clone without booting into some wonky command prompt os. It's fast and simple with no need to partition or format the drive. The software does everything for you. Unfortunately, it only works if your destination disk is a Samsung. It would be nice if it worked for other drives as well but I doubt Samsung would ever do that. Macrium reflect has failed me many times and so has this minitool. Aemoi backupper used to be good but it's slow as molasses now.

Brian I see you set the new drive as GPT drive yet the software changed it to MBR is that normal? and will it make any difference to the operation of the machine? My curiosity is why set the new drive as GPT in the first place? I used to use Macrium but found it very difficult to run a clone because I used to get error messages telling me that the procedure could not be run? So I used AOMEI but am not so sure that it is as good as Macrium. A video on how to use Macrium would be a great idea👍

Thank you, excellent explanation. Just what I needed to upgrade and copy my drives 🤘

This is literally what I am doing this weekend. A complete teardown and overhaul of my gaming PC and replacing the 120GB SSD bootdrive with a 500GB M.2. So helpful. Thank you for posting such a great easy to follow tutorial.

i used the software you recommended and fallowed you step by step, worked flawless. thanks.

For cloning drives, I use Macrium Reflect. It is free for non-commercial use. For partitioning software I use G-Parted, which is a free Linux package that can be installed to a bootable memory stick.

I see the Migrate Operation had left the new M.2 Drive set up with MBR... and not the new GPT as you originally wanted. So I guess that is an extra step at the end that must be achieved.

Thank you soo much! I've had this hard drive for 10 years and it's finally starting to kick the bucket, now I can safely move it to my new NVMe drive!

My old hard drive was clacking so loud my desk was almost shaking, so I swapped it out with a nice, quiet SSD. Your instructions made it easy. Thank you! The only issue I ran into was accessing cmos on my machine. So I physically removed the old drive and plugged the new drive in it's place. Started up the machine and it recognized the new drive, and prompted me to press F1 to accept. It's like a new computer! 👍

Very informative tutorial. Would you please make a tutorial about keeping a drive backup as a file for restoration? Sometimes we face problems with C drive or windows. Then we need to reinstall fresh windows and reinstall all the required software. Please demonstrate a solution so that we can easily restore the corrupted/disturbed windows within a few minutes from the old backup that we kept from the C drive after installing all the required software when it was performing well. THANKS in advance.

This did not work for me as the wizard program freeze when restart is required. Operation (1) of (4) 0% and its frozen.

Your IT video's are easily the best on RU-vid, clear, and understandable even for an old bloke like me, Thanks

This was one of the easiest and most informative and helpful tutorials. It went perfect thanks to you!

Worked FLAWLESSLY thank you sir PSA: For anybody that wants to KEEP the original drive (I.e moving from a 100gb ssd to a 1tb ssd like me) and you do not see the new drive in the boot priority, you might need to go into the bios to change the boot from legacy to UEFI, and then go into UEFI boot settings and swap the priority #1 to the new drive. Then it should show up in the basic boot priority list as the default drive.

Awesome tutorial. It worked perfectly. My Windows went from an hd to a same sized 1tb ssd, it is so much faster now. The only thing I had to differently was going to the bios control and changing the boot to the ssd, it was still booting from the old hard drive after the files were copied. You saved me time and money. Thank you so much!

Thank you a lot for the tutorial, just did it in my PC and it worked flawlessly. Thank you!

Literally the best walk through I could find after hours of searching! Thank you!

Great information and tutorial as always! But one small yet hugely useful suggestion for you to consider: try to be a bit more specific about the approximate time duration for operations like this. Saying "give it a bit of time" is much less useful than mentioning specific potential durations. For example, in your case, you said your source drive didn't have much data that needed to be copied over. Great. But exactly how long did the process take for you with approximately how much data you needed here to be copied? This kind of relative information would give people extremely useful information to compare with if they do this on their own systems. Cheers!

what if it freezes at the 8:26 screen :(

Thanks for the awesome tip about version 10. At my grandpas today doing a hard drive to ssd upgrade and haven’t used this since 2017. This saved me $60 thanks!

Great video, straight to the point and explained each step well.

What’s the difference migrate vs cloning?

You can 't download Version 10 anymore. You'll get a 500 Error!

Thanks for this, I am building a friend a gaming PC using parts from my old PC's, Win 10 was on a small SSD 80Gb, and moved it to another spare 500Gb SSD I had, worked perfectly and didn't take long.

Haven’t finished moving to e data over but everything is going smoothly so far! Thank youuu!!!!

Best video I've used in quite sometime. Great explanation for us dummies.

Just migrated, your video was the best and most descriptive. Many thanks.

This is my first time migrating an OS from a HDD to NVMe SSD. You sir are a LEGEND! I was planning to reformat my HDD then install a new OS to my NVMe but thanks to you I saved a lot of time and effort ❤

This is a life saver, thank you so much! Works great, i migrated between 2 SSD and it worked!

Thank you. Very informative. Just used this video to clone my hdd on my nitro 5 to a new ssd. Worked great!

Thank you ❤ Very easy to understand and easy to follow

Thank you very much! I've installed the windows on the same drive (couldn't choose the drive), and your guide really helped me, instead of formatting all the hardisk... I just copied all to the new M.2.

Clear, Concise, and Direct. Thank you for this tutorial and experience.

Everything worked for me following your steps exactly. Thank you!

I followed the video step by step and it worked very well thank you so much !!

Excellent video, thank you so much. Everything was explained very clearly and in great detail. I appreciate it.

This is a splendid video and it’s been so helpful. Thank you!