RUN WINDOWS FROM YOUR SSD
Most laptops and many all-in-one PCS, where the components are built into the back of the monitor, only have room for one drive. So, when you swap their existing hard drive for an SSD, you’ll have no way of starting up. That’s why, on pages 52-53, we showed you how to create a Windows installer stick, which you can use to set up Windows on your new drive.
With a full-size desktop computer, it’s a different story. You often have room for two drives, or more, which means you can leave your existing hard drive where it is and install an SSD alongside it. If you do, it makes sense to move Windows from your hard drive to the SSD by cloning it, so you can boot from your new, faster disk. Your computer will start more quickly and should be more responsive in general. You can then re-use the old hard drive for storing photos, documents, and other data.
Check the sizes of your drives
Start by making a complete backup of your data. Any time you move files between drives, there’s a risk they may be lost or corrupted in the process. Next, compare the sizes of your new SSD and the amount of data you currently have on your hard drive. To do this, open File Explorer and click This PC in the sidebar, then click View on the toolbar and select Tiles. You’ll see both your old hard drive and your new SSD in the main pane.
In our screenshot above right, the old drive is called ‘OS (C:)’ , and the new one is ‘Kingston (D:)’ . As you can see from the line below the new drive’s name, it has a total capacity of 447GB
. The same line below the C: drive shows that it has 245GB free out of a total of 475GB . Subtracting one from the other reveals that the existing drive holds only 230GB of data, which will fit easily on to our new SSD. So, we can clone everything.
If the SSD is smaller than the amount of used space on your hard drive, you’ll need to shift some of your data elsewhere before you can clone Windows to your new SSD. You have several options, the simplest of which is to copy the data to a large external hard drive, SSD or USB stick. You can pick up a 256GB Sandisk Ultra Fit stick for £26 (www.snipca.com/40960) or a 512GB Sandisk Ultra for £53 (www.snipca. com/40961, pictured below) – both of which you can re-use for backup and storage when you’ve finished setting up your SSD.
Alternatively, you could upload your data to an online service like pcloud (www.snipca.com/40962), where 500GB plans start at £42.99 a year, and 2TB plans start at £85.99 (both are introductory prices). If you’re using a synchronisation service, like Dropbox, make sure you aren’t simply duplicating your data on the cloud while retaining a copy on your hard drive, because this won’t save you any space.
Dropbox has a Selective Sync option (www.snipca. com/40963) that lets you specify which folders should be stored only online and removed from your PC. While we have no reason to suspect Dropbox will lose your data, we would always advise maintaining at least one other copy somewhere else should you get locked out of your account, or the transfer not complete due to a broadband failure.
When you’ve copied your data from your drive and verified that the copy is complete (and preferably backed up a second time elsewhere), you can delete it from your hard drive.
Copy Windows to your SSD
For the next step, we’ll be using AOMEI Backupper Professional, which costs $49.95 (£36.80 at the time of writing) from www.snipca.com/40979. As its name suggests, Backupper does a lot more than just clone hard drives, also allowing you to create recovery media, back up individual files, and write to CDS and DVDS among other tasks.
Launch the program and, when Windows asks if you’re happy for it to make changes to your device, click Yes. Now click the Register button on the home screen and enter the serial number that will have been sent to the email address you supplied when buying the software. Although many of the functions work without a serial number, you’ll
need it to create your bootable clone.
To start, click Clone in the sidebar, followed by Disk Clone. Backupper needs to know what you want to clone, and where it should be saved. So, on the Source Disk screen, click your existing hard drive. This will usually be called Disk0, as you can see in our screenshot below left. Click ‘Next’, then click your SSD on the Destination Disk screen.
Backupper will warn you that all the data on your destination disk will be erased as part of the clone process. Assuming it’s blank, or you have a copy of any contents you want to keep, click OK. Backupper will now show a summary of your clone options. Double-check that it shows your hard drive on the left ( in our screenshot right), and your SSD on the right , with the arrow between them pointing to the SSD to indicate the direction in which the data will travel.
Tick the box beside SSD Alignment then click the orange Start Clone button A circular counter will track the clone operation’s progress. When it reaches 100 per cent, click Finish. You now need to set your PC to boot from the SSD, rather than the hard drive. The process for doing so is similar to the one we used when booting from the USB stick on which we set up the Windows installer on pages 52-53.
Reboot your PC and press the button that takes you into the UEFI/BIOS (usually F1, F2, F10, F12 or Del). Now work your way through the configuration screens until you find the option to specify the boot order. This should be set to check your hard drive first. The exact process for changing the boot order differs between manufacturers, so check any on-screen instructions, but there are two common methods.
The first, where all possible options are displayed in a list, is to highlight the SSD, then use the keys specified on-screen to move it up the list until it’s in the top position. The second way, where the options sit beside headings, is to highlight the first boot device and press Enter to open a list of alternative options, and to select the SSD from this sub-menu.
Save your changes, exit the BIOS and allow your PC to reboot. Because you cloned your drive rather than installing a fresh copy of Windows, it should look the same as it did when you booted from the hard drive. The key benefit, though, is the shorter boot time.
Re-use your hard drive
Use your new system for a couple of days to make sure it’s working as you expect. If you have no problems, you can wipe your hard drive and use it as an internal storage device for documents, photos and other data, while keeping Windows and programs on the SSD, from which they’ll launch more quickly.
Make a copy of your data on a separate drive, then open File Explorer and click This PC in the sidebar. Now look at the drives displayed in the main pane. The C: drive, which was previously your hard drive, will now be the SSD. If the hard drive previously had only one partition, it should now be called D:, although if it was particularly large, the manufacturer may have partitioned it into two smaller drives, in which case you may see D: and E:. If you have a CD or DVD drive, check that the icon of the drive you’re working with is a hard drive, and not an optical disc, as these commonly occupy E:.
Right-click the hard-drive icon and select Format from the context menu. When the format box appears, make sure NTFS is selected in the ‘File system’ dropdown menu ( in our screenshot above), and the box beside Quick Format is ticked in the ‘Format options’ panel then click Start . This will delete the contents of the selected partition. When it’s finished, copy your data back on to the clean partition.