So, you have a Windows 10 (this probably applies to Windows 7 and forward) computer and you want to replace your system drive because you have a bad feeling about the health of the current drive, or you just want a larger SSD.
If you start searching on Google (or Bing) for this, you will get so many crappy answers: plenty of companies want to sell you tools, and Microsoft provides so much information that is hard to make any sense of. This is a simple and (quite) safe procedure that worked for me.
What you need
- A new hard drive, larger than the previous one
- A USB key, at least 8GB
- A USB hard drive, with enough space for backing up all your files
All drives should contain nothing of value as they will all be reformatted in the process.
Steps
- Create a Recovery Drive to the USB key (2)
- Create a System Image to the USB hard drive (3)
- Turn your computer off
- Replace your current system drive with the new one (1)
- For safety, unplug drives that you don’t want restored
- Start computer from your Recovery Drive (2)
- Choose Advanced
- Plug in System Image drive (3)
- Restore System Image
- Restore to your new hard drive (1)
- Profit!
This is a safe way to upgrade hard drive because:
- You always have your original system intact and you can put your old hard drive back if anything goes wrong.
- You completely only use standard Windows tools. From Windows/Microsoft perspective your original hard drive broke, you were smart enough to have proper backup, and you simply restored your backup.
- It is anyway a good thing to always have (2) and (3) in case of disaster.
Problems, Annoyances, Caveats
The process is quite annoying.
- Just finding out where in Windows to create Recovery Image and System Image is a pain.
- Creating the Recovery Drive is very slow, despite you have a fast USB Key
- I did not click Advanced after starting the Recovery Drive. That ended up formatting a non-system-drive that was plugged in (I realised my mistake too late).
References
Howtogeek
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