Clone OS from 500Gb to 256 GB SSD?

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rbarr110

Limp Gawd
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Jan 8, 2003
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So my son has run out of space on his 500gb hard drive on his PC. I have a spare 256gb ssd collecting dust and I thought I would install it on his PC. However, I really dont want do a fresh install and he doesn't want to potentially lose anything by deleting programs and/or moving files so that the platter drive contents will fit on the SSD.

I was looking at various products that claim they can clone the OS portion of the drive to a smaller SSD. Has anyone done this or have a preferred software solution to do this? Also, will the cloned OS be able to find the programs that would now be located on "Drive D" that were once on C?

This is one of the products I looked at:
https://www.disk-partition.com/clone/clone-500gb-hdd-to-256gb-ssd-0310.html
 
mwroobel said:
What brand SSD is it? Many of the major manufacturers have free migration software.
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Its an older crucial SSD that I have had for a while. I have used Samsung migration, but never recalled an option to just clone the OS.
 
yes you can do that clone with easeus. steam games you can repoint to the new location. if they are stand alone, non-steam games, prob not. some might work if they dont have a bunch of reg entries you might be able to just create a new shortcut.
 
rbarr110 said:
I was looking at various products that claim they can clone the OS portion of the drive to a smaller SSD. Has anyone done this or have a preferred software solution to do this? Also, will the cloned OS be able to find the programs that would now be located on "Drive D" that were once on C?
Click to expand...

Most Windows programs don't like to be moved. So as a practical matter, it doesn't make sense to clone the OS without the apps. If it's just random files taking up the space, then a cloning program that lets you exclude things would work.
 
Yeah it really comes down to what is taking up the space. Is it all from installed games or is this from stuff like movies and porn?

It might be easier to just install the SSD as a secondary drive. Use 64GB of it as SSD cache for the mechanical drive (Assuming Z68 or newer Intel system). Use the rest of the SSD as a data drive and manually relocate a few of his favorite games onto the SSD.
 
You can clone a larger disk to a smaller disk but not if the larger disk has more space used than the small disk. It is really just resizing the partition during cloning. You have to get the used space down to below the size of the new drive. Disable pagefile and hibernation will get you some space, also make sure you ran a disk cleanup. If you have a lot of games delete them, it is easy to re-download games. If it is media files then you need another disk to copy them to temporarily.
 
Your best solution is just install Windows (or whatever OS) again, you're not really going to be able to clone just the OS alone; cloning copies the entire partition structure bit for bit so, the issue here as has already been noted is that you said he's "run out of space" on the 500GB and now you're looking at cloning all that data to a 256GB.

Now, having said that, if you or your son had split the 500GB drive into at least two partitions, with one for the OS only and then the rest for storage/data/apps/etc, that's a doable thing easily, yes, as long as the OS partition is smaller than that 256GB. If the 500GB is one big partition the only real solution would be to get all the data - NOT the OS - off the drive to make it as small as possible in terms of how much space is used, with just the OS on it (and perhaps some of the more important or relevant apps). If you have another hard drive around that could hold that data during this process then sure, that works too.

But also as noted, if it's Windows, and if there are a lot of apps, you're going to end up with a lot of issues because also as noted Windows apps aren't portable in the common usage of the word with respect to computer software. Once it's installed it's expecting files related to be in specific places and it's not as easy as just using new drive letters which wrecks things tremendously.

So my own recommendation is:

- do a clean installation of Windows on the SSD (I'd do a Secure ATA Erase on it beforehand using Parted Magic to ensure it's as clean as it can be - a zero wipe is a bad bad idea which is what most drive erasers do, they are NOT good ideas for SSDs, and you can read more about the proper Secure ATA Erase for SSDs here: https://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/)

- install some or most of the apps/games on the SSD and during the installation you might be able to define a data directory for the apps/games and point them to that 500GB hard drive, it might work, it might not

Of course, if you really want to do it right, just get a 500GB SSD, those Samsung 860 EVO 500GB drives are running about $100 these days, then you'd have plenty of very fast storage for everything with a cloning operation and then the 500GB hard drive for backups/etc.
 
I use Paragon Migrate OS to SSD, costs $20 and haven't had an issue yet. Done a few dozen migrations for various machines.
I do all the migration on my main PC, just hook up the source and destination drives to my PC and run the program.
It will see any OS's installed on any of the drives and allow you to select which OS you want to migrate, then if there isn't enough space on the destination, you can select files and folders not to be migrated.

I'll use a pair of USB to SATA cables for doing laptop drives, and a 3.5" USB caddy for doing desktop drives.
IMG_1322.JPG IMG_1323.JPG
paragon-migrate-01.jpg
paragon-migrate-02.jpg paragon-migrate-04.jpg

For programs that are left on the spinner, you can probably use Symbolic links to keep the programs working.
I used it once in the past to get a program to work that was moved to another drive due to lack of space.
 
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AOMEI Partition Assistant software is the very good choice. I used this software to clone the OS partition to the new drive on my laptop and at the work on the production servers without any issues. The software is very easy and has information about all the settings that you can choose.
 
If it were me, I'd grab the latest Win10 ISO from Microsoft's website, the network/wireless and iGPU/dGPU drivers from the manufacturer's website, make a bootable USB drive, and perform a fresh install on the SSD.
 
DejaWiz said:
If it were me, I'd grab the latest Win10 ISO from Microsoft's website, the network/wireless and iGPU/dGPU drivers from the manufacturer's website, make a bootable USB drive, and perform a fresh install on the SSD.
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I recently wound up doing this while troubleshooting- clean installs just make you feel giddy when you get them up!

Totally worth setting a few things up afterward. And if you keep your Steam/Origin/Uplay/etc. stuff on a separate partition, you can just rerun the installer and then point it to the game folders and roll on.
 
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