Posted on 10/21/2025 7:42:59 AM PDT by Paul R.
A quickie? After many other things coming up the last couple weeks, I'm finally ready to clone my boot drive onto a 2nd SSD. A bit later, my plan is to acquire an "industrial" reliability Samsung NVMe SSD and replace the used Micron NVMe drive now housing my boot disk. I have Macrium Reflect Free Edition installed and running, and basically just poked around a bit to brush up - it's been a little while since I've cloned a drive / disk.
Disk 3, the NVMe, "houses" "C:" & shows 4 partitions:
1 - No Name (None) Primary - FAT32 (LBA) 44.9 MB 100.0 MB
2 - (None) Primary - Unformatted 16 MB 16MB
3 - (C:) Primary - NTFS 66.40 GB 237.57 GB
4 - (None) Primary - NTFS Unformatted 626.8 MB 6807.0 MB
- - - - -
Disk 2 (the destination SSD) partition shows up as:
1 - - (None) Primary - Unformatted 16.0 MB 16.0 MB
and 447.12 GB of free space.
- - - - -
Disk 1 is my data disk, and is "uninvolved" here.
Do I need to bring over all 4 partitions from Disk 3 to disk 2? In particular, partition 2 is not formatted, so, I'm not sure what it is there for or if it is needed.
I suppose "KISS" could be thought of as applying both ways (do or don't clone disk 3, partition 2).
Note: This "new" computer has been in light use for several months, and heavier use more recently, as it is now my primary desktop machine. The OS is Win 11 Pro. ((My old Win 10 Prop machine is most likely going to become my "learn Linux" machine, as 11 Pro is pushing me past my tolerance for several things... But, for now, I need to keep a quick 11 Pro machine going too.)
Do I need to bring over partition 2 from Disk 3 to Disk 2?
It's not a "big deal", I suppose, as it's only 16 MB of storage. It just "looks" more complicated to have it there. ;-)
Thanks in advance, All!
Ping!..............
Ping!..............
:-)
One other question: Once the cloning process is complete, will Disk 2 still have roughly 209 GB of unallocated space on it?
Yikes!
I’ll be out for a short while. Gotta chop, well, saw up, a large branch that came down a couple days ago, and get it out of our ditch. And maybe get around to breakfast!
I had your whole vanity translated into Greek, and it still doesn’t make any sense.
🙄
Speaking of “Ping!”
I tried cloning years ago ,big fail , LOL Now I do fresh install on new SSD and I use an ssd external hard drive enclosure for the old drive and move what a I want ,LOL
I know the feeling. Despite the amount of effort I put into managing my family’s computers, I don’t think I know even 10% of what I wish I did.
And then there’s understanding my dear wife, even after 24 + years of being married...
Anyway, outta here for a bit.
Cloning can be tricky. You need a virtual identical drive to close to. It's usually better, albeit slower, to perform a system backup and then perform a system recovery on the new drive (using a flash drive to boot up the recovery software).
*You need a virtually identical drive to clone to.
Why don’t you join a computer hobbyist group on meetup? We have a country to save and you are trying to squeeze a few more years out of a worthless computer.
Yes. Bring over all the partitions. Even though not formatted windows has requirements you may not be aware of. But why are you cloning a solid state drive to another? Solid state drives have no moving parts and will outlast you. Just add the second SSD and use it as your data drive.
since you’re using Samsung, perhaps you could use what I did, and learned of on Explaining Computers.
I think this is the right vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gTJw8ehkVc
If not, here’s the search link:
https://www.youtube.com/@ExplainingComputers/search?query=drive%20copy
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