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I am planning to replace the old hard drive in my laptop with a new SSD, but reinstalling Windows 10 on the SSD is too cumbersome. I wonder whether there is a way to move current installed Windows OS to the new SSD from the old HDD without losing any data. Any constructive suggestion will be thankful.
Hello. If you need to move Windows 10 OS only to the SSD from HDD drive, a partition cloning app is enough. Check this post: How to upgrade laptop’s hard drive to SSD without reinstalling Windows. If you need to clone the entire HDD drive including all partitions/volumes to the SSD, you need a disk cloning app. But, if the capacity of the SSD is smaller than that of the HDD, disk cloning cannot be implemented.
You need to use a cloning app with both drives connected to the system you copy over what your HDD has to the SSD in its entirety. But! before you do that you’ll likely need to clean off some of your stuff as I bet you your SSD is smaller than your HDD and its full! Get a spare drive to copy off your data so you have at least a backup, then clean things up. I do recommend running a HD health app and then defragging the drive before starting as a healthy and organized drive will work better.
