I got a new larger SSD a while ago and finally got around to replacing my Win10 system drive this past weekend. I started by making a clone of my c: drive using DriveImageXML which works really well. However, when I went to replace my old SSD with the new one, I realized that the system reserved partition hadn’t been cloned along with the data. After attempting to switch the new drive out with the old and fiddling with the BIOS boot options, I realized it wasn’t going to work so I started doing some research.

I replaced the old drive and made a system restore disk to hopefully allow me to run diskpart and bootrec commands to get the new drive to be bootable. The disk worked well but I was never successfully able to get it to boot from the new drive.

I almost paid $60 for MiniTool Partition Wizard before downloading the free home version of Macrium Reflect which allows you to close the whole disk to another drive. After downloading, installing and registering, I kicked off the clone operation that took about 90 miniutes or so to complete. The new SSD looked just like the old drive (same partition sizes, etc) so I used MiniTool to change the partition sizes and delete some unneeded ones. I shutdown, swapped out the old drive for the new one and booted up.

I was happy when I saw the windows logo and heard the startup sound! Things are working great now and I have enough room to install some games as well. What to do with that 256GB SSD now?