While those tools are great when you all the power and nuance they provide, for your typical copy disk A to disk B job, they’re significant overkill (and often with a wide margin for errors).Our goal is to get this done quickly, efficiently, and with very minimal chance of misstepping and as such we’ve opted to use the free version of Macrium Reflect as it’s quite user friendly with an excellent GUI. There are some really powerful cloning tools out there that require very careful use of their very sophisticated components. If you want some tips for paring down, check out the preparation section of our previous and related tutorial: How To Migrate Windows 7 to a Solid State DriveĬloning Software: The third thing you’ll need is cloning software. are within constraints of the new smaller disk) you’ll be fine. you move all your music and movies off that big 1TB HDD so that the core operating system, applications, etc. This tutorial is focused on upgrading the existing disk to a larger one, but as long as you par down your data on the old disk to within the parameters of the new disk (e.g. RELATED: How to Migrate Your Windows Installation to a Solid-State Drive If you, for instance, bought a cheap and slow 1TB mechanical HDD on sale and discovered that it wasn’t such hot disk to use as your operating system disk, you might be in the market for a smaller and faster 256GB SSD or the like.

Ideally you’ll be migrating from a smaller drive to a larger drive, but there are situations where you may be migrating from a larger to smaller drive.

Hard Disks: The first two, and most obvious: you’ll need your existing hard drive and a second new hard drive.

The first three are must have items and the fourth is variable dependent on your hardware setup and needs. What Do I Need?įor this tutorial you’ll need four things. With that kind of turn around, and the little amount of hassle involved in actually completing the process, suddenly those much more affordable and spacious solid-state drives are looking mighty fine.

Macrium reflect clone red bar in disk