Have a notebook with a Win 7 to Win 10 upgrade on it but still on a mechanical HDD. Instead of clean installing Win 10 onto the new SSD I thought to save on hours of setup I could image the drive with Macrium and transfer everything including the OS to the SSD with the Macrium image.
Is the correct way to do this with the restore function in Macrium?
Such a transfer would be based on your image being of all partitions created by Windows when installed, not just the Windows partition. (Macrium has a button to help with creating such an image).
This may help - from MR's own help pages, accessible from the Help button on MR's GUI:
Restoring an image from within the Rescue Media - KnowledgeBase v7.2 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase - KnowledgeBase v7.2 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase
Note this permits partition resizing should the SSD be smaller, for example.
As you started with an upgrade from Win 7, i assume you are still using MBR rather than UEFI, and you're replacing the HDD with a SSD in the same PC.
Note from the above:
Master Boot Record:To replace the Master Boot Record (MBR) with the MBR from the backup.
The MBR is a small program that eexecutes when the computer starts up. If this program becomes corrupt then you can have problems starting the computer operating system.
Note: On modern GPT/UEFI systems this option has no effect.
@dalchina
Usually a full system image contains all of the Windows partitions and a restore can be done from within Macrium as long as the drive your restoring to isn't the OS drive which in this case it isn't... I'm glad you brought the MBR up though as I did not think of that. As it was a Win 7 to 10 upgrade it very likely is a MBR... Is it possible to change the MBR to UEFI and would it be worth the trouble?
MR's help manual includes converting between the two- but if your PC has legacy BIOS only, considering UEFI is irrelevant.
http://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v...df?src=sidebar
pg 236
So whether it's relevant depends on what your target PC supports.
If this person does not benefit from GPT is there any point converting?
Edit: The drive may already be in GPT anyway... Will need to check.
It's one way, and it works. I had a failing HDD on one machine and did (almost) exactly what you describe. This was on a UEFI machine. Both the original HDD and the SSD replacement were the same size (which made life easier - no need to resize partitions on restore).
I first made an image of all partitions from the failing machine to an external HDD. The only difference was that I had the luxury of a spare machine that I could use to restore the image to the new SSD while it was in an external usb enclosure. Then I replaced the failing HDD with the SSD that was now a copy of the original.
After restoring you may need to boot from the Macrium rescue usb and use its 'Restore > Fix Windows Boot Problems' tool before you can boot from the SSD, but after that everything was there and working, as it had been on the original HDD.
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