Migrating from HDD to SSD, many partitions, need some advice

asusx205ta · 14 Dec 2016

I have an HP laptop with the following partitions:

Migrating from HDD to SSD, many partitions, need some advice-capture.png

The HDD has 750GB capacity. The first 4 partitions are for win 10. I am guessing that the first recovery partition became too small at some point of system update/upgrade and win 10 created a second one that is bigger. The 329.88GB partition and the 3.93GB partition are linux. I don't plan to move them. I'll reinstall a new linux distro. The last partition is a recovery partition from HP. It should no longer be useful. The original OS was win 8 or 8.1 so the HP partition is probably full of 8/8.1. So essentially I want to move maybe the second recovery partition, the EFI partition, and the windows partition (after shrinking) to a 250GB SSD.

My EFI partition has a grub installed so I can select who OS to boot into, linux or win 10.

My question is:
If I decide to only move three partitions: EFI, larger recovery partition, and main win 10 partition, I don't think it is going to work. I don't know how partitions are referred to in EFI bootloader. How do I do the move? Thanks.

dalchina · 15 Dec 2016

Hi, actually you'll find there's also a 16Mb System Reserved partition you can't see in Disk Management.
Here's how I'd do it - and it's been done by me and others.

1. Create a full disk image (e.g. Macrium Reflect (free) + its boot medium + external storage for images
(I hope you're using disk images routinely anyway- everyone should)
2. Shrink your existing Windows partition so it will fit on your 256Gb SSD. (You can move personal data off it or uninstall large progs for now....
3. Update your disk image
4. Insert your SSD and configure your BIOS to use AHCI for best performance. (I'd remove your HDD meanwhile).
5. Install Win 10 to the SSD, making sure your Windows partition is a little larger than your then existing one on the HDD.
6. Replace the Windows partition with the one from your disk image.
7. Run start-up repair.

Then you'd need to deal with dual booting Linux, and anything you removed from your Windows partition.
(I prefer to have my personal data on a separate partition).