Best way to transfer OS to SSD?

Question

I am running out of hard drive space due to installing too many games from various giveaways over the last two years.

I went to install a second hard drive, only to find that there is no bay for a second conventional hard drive and no place to put/mount the second drive even though there are two free SATA ports and an extra SATA power port. Strange.

There is a slot for an M2 drive, so I exchanged the 4tb drive for a 1tb m2 drive.

The existing drive is 1.5tb and has less than 50gb free.

However now I'm faced with the issue. The OS is on the OEM 1.5tb drive, but the SSD is much faster. What's the best way to transfer my copy of Windows 10 Pro to the new hard drive?

Most of the methods I looked up suggest making an image, but I don't have enough free space to do that, and there is no way to copy a 1.5tb image onto a 1tb drive.

If I install Windows 10 from scratch, would activation be an issue? I'd really rather not do that as I mentioned there are a lot of games that need to be downloaded and installed (Epic doesn't let you save an offline copy for something like this) that would probably put me over the 250gb/month bandwith limit my ISP has.

Any suggestions do do I need to bite the bullet and get out my Restore USB drive?

For that matter, will I have trouble with activation? I did not link my Microsoft account to my user account as I didn't want all the tracking and ads. Obviously this means I didn't link the product key/license to a Microsoft account either as I did NOT want a Microsoft account. Especially since those aren't as easy to integrate into my network with a legacy WinXP and Win7 computer on it. With all other computers since win95, I just use the same user account and they automatically work.

Answer 1

Hi, SlickRCBD

Unfortunately, the operating system and all installed apps should be reinstalled manually. Since you just change the hard drive not the motherboard, you would not face license issues.

Please do not hesitate to ask if you have more questions.

Stay safe and have a nice day.

Answer 2

If you buy a Samsung SSD you can run Samsung Magician and clone everything from your original drive. Then boot from that and it should work exactly as it did.

Answer 3

There are some options to avoid a reinstall but there are some benefits as well. A fresh install removes a lot of clutter and trims down the registry. However IMHO a top of the line backup/recovery application is worth the cost when you really need it, so why not get something like Macrium? It allows you to upgrade your HD whenever you need and can be a godsend if your drive ever crashes. Be careful if you're using a bitlocker encrypted drive, you'll need the key in advance.

Answer 4

Please assume I have a budget of zero. The hard drive was a Christmas present, and I also got a pink slip for Christmas.

Lots of people are quick to ask me to shell out $100+ solutions to problems, like "just buy the newest version".

It sucks being poor.

Answer 5

I had to exchange it for something in stock in the Best Buy at Schaumburg (though I probably could have gone to another Best Buy). I exchanged it for the biggest SSD drive they had in stock, but it was only 1tb. It wasn't a Sony brand either and didn't come with any software. In fact, it was unformatted. Oh, I forgot the drive was actually 2tb, but only about 1.5 was usable because of the recovery partitions.

Yes, I haven't done anything with it yet, I was hoping for an easier way than spending all day reinstalling from scratch. Plus it's a blizzard outside and I'm afraid we might lose power so I really don't want to start something like that right now.