OS transfer to SSD

RightfulSin

Ok, I am not sure if this is the right forum or if it should be in the tech forum, but here we go. As the title suggests I am wanting to migrate my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit to my new Samsung SSD. I would like to do so without having to do a fresh install or anything. The harddrive I have is 1TB and the new SSD is 500GB, so the target drive is smaller. I have tried to use some software I found, but whenever it gets to a certain part, it locks up because it states that the target drive is insufficient in space, which is obvious. How can I separate the OS from everything else so i can transfer only that to the SSD? PS I am doing this to have the SS in the same desktop, but to have the OS boot-up be faster. Also, how would I select other programs(such as Steam games like PoE) to move over on to the SSD for ease and quickness of boot-up? Thanks for the help.

Soggybiscuit

It's been a long time since I've done this, but I believe the general process is:

1) Shrink the boot partition on your original HDD to something smaller than the new SSD capacity
2) Image that partition onto new drive
3) Once you've verified the new drive boots and everything works, you can expand the partition back out to fill the new drive.

Rius

Good clone software will do most/all of that automatically. Download "MiniTool Partition Wizard" which has a free version that'll do this for you (I just used it myself a couple days ago to do basically the same thing.)

As long as your 1TB HDD is not more than like 45% full, you should be able to clone it easily to the SSD. The software will handle resizing the partition to fit on the SSD.

If you've got more than your SSD's capacity of data on the HDD, then you'll have to copy stuff off the HDD to an external hard drive first, or delete stuff. There really isn't a clean way of just copying over your Windows installation, it's much easier to clone the entire drive.

RightfulSin

Thanks all. Well thats a bit annoying seeing as the 1TB is about 80% full. I can see how full my external is. I would just have to transfer all to the external (program by program) then do the SSD clone, then copy the external back on to the 1TB?
I mainly only want the OS, and Path of Exile, and maybe Warframe on the SSD right now, seems like such a pain to have to move 900GB of data to external then back just for that. Annoying that the OS can't be just some standalone thing that can be moved more easily.

Korror

Yea, I had this same issue when moving my OS to a SSD. I ended up deleting everything I didn't need to shrink it down to below the SSD size and then just copying everything over. SoggyBuiscuit has the a good idea about moving things to a separate partition if you don't want to delete everything but you're still going to be doing a lot of moving files before you can copy your OS over.

Mugsley

Honestly I would advocate a fresh Win10 install and use your general usage to determine which files/folders need to be moved to the SSD. Within 1-2 months, you should know which programs or folders need moved to the SSD.

You can also use utilities like WinDirStat to give you an idea of which files or folders are taking up the most space, then you can decide whether they can be moved to an external drive if you want to use the cloning process.

Steam can now move folders for you. I've also used Steam Mover in the past to great success.

AngelHedgie

Since you said your new drive is Samsung, I would look into their transfer utility, which is supposed to be one of the best on the market.