I have a USB recovery drive made from windows 10 recover tool (Create a Recovery drive)
I installed an SSD (it is smaller, and not formatted)
When I boot from the USB it tells me the system drive is too small.
Is it because the system drive is not formatted/partitoned. Or really too small.
There was not enough of anything on the original hd to need much space so the ssd is plenty big enough.
Some further considerations for you:
To make the best use of your SSD (best performance) normally you would enable AHCI in the BIOS, and clean install.
If your HDD uses MBR, not UEFI/GPT, that could be another consideration as to whether to clean install or not.
However, if you wished to effectively clone your HDD (but reducing partition sizes to fit) it should be possible to enable AHCI afterwards.
Enable AHCI in Windows 8 and Windows 10 after Installation Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials
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Macrium Software | Your Image is Everything
Yes, it sounds like your image is bigger then the ssd.
As suggested do a clean install.
Or, shrink your C partition so it`ll fit on the ssd. Use Macrium Reflect to create a Disk image then image that to the new ssd.
I don`t even think you have to shrink the image if you use Macrium, but I would.
And make sure you image ALL the necessary partitions.
If you want, post a shot of Disk Management.
Last edited by AddRAM; 09 Aug 2017 at 21:29.
How big is the SSD? Also, I would use Microsoft's Media Creation Tool to create a vanilla Windows installation USB flash drive. Boot from that drive to install just plain Windows 10 with. Also, when you do a clean install to a newly connected SSD - it is best to keep the old HDD disconnected until after the install of Windows onto the SSD is finished. If you don't do that, you are likely to end up with the boot files on the old HDD instead of the new SSD.
When you create a recovery drive from within Windows, it will also keep and use any customizations that the manufacturer included from the factory - which may mean set partition sizes meant for specific size hard drive. The vanilla Windows 10 USB flash drive created with the Media Creation Tool will not include those customizations, so it should install to any drive 32GB or larger.
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If you do want to keep your current Windows 10 installation, as long as the space actually used on the HDD is less than the size of the SSD, you can use Macrium Reflect Free to either clone the HDD to the SSD, or create an image and restore it to the SSD, shrinking the Windows partition in the process to fit on the SSD. However - if the old HDD was booting in legacy BIOS (CSM mode) and you changed the UEFI Firmware (BIOS) to boot in UEFI mode, it won't boot until you do a couple of conversions (MBR to GPT on the SSD and create a FAT32 EFI System partition).
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