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How to backup up windows for a drive replacement.


MarkJohnson

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I am fixing a friends computer.  It needs a new SSD.  It won't be here until Saturday.  She wants it working today!  My spare PC has a M.2 nvme SSD I can use.

Whats the best way to backup and then restore this.

I have a 1TB backup drive on my spare PC.  Is there a simple way to backup with Windows built-in software? 

How would I restore it? My system wouldn't have windows installed on the new SSD.

This seems complicated.

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It's too small, and won't boot windows anymore.  I reinstalled Windows and it still won't boot.  I even used diskpart and cleaned the drive and it still won't boot.  I t will still copy files and stuff to it when I connect it to me pc.  It won't even boot on my PC either when I install windows.  It's only 120GB sata III.

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I hoped for someone more experienced to hop in here...

I'm not an expert, but I'd use some tool like dmde or dd to create binary image of the disk mentioned. This is not the most easy-going way, but at lease you are sure that whatever bad happens, you have exact copy of the state from before your modifications.

On 2/21/2019 at 7:32 PM, MarkJohnson said:

It's too small, and won't boot windows anymore.  I reinstalled Windows and it still won't boot.

And that makes me doubt, I remember I used x64 tablet with 64 GB eMMC storage and windows 10 with current updates applied, and it was working.

So assuming that you can mount it as a slave drive and browse on other PC, I'd just remove unnecessary files, so it has enough free space to launch and create temp files and page file, and try to boot. If this does not help, it means that failure root cause is not too little space. And no, I cannot say what at the moment.

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  • 1 month later...

better use either Macrium Reflect free or Easeus Todo Backup free and do a "disk clone" which copies the entire contents (including the MBR and perhaps hidden partitions) from one drive to another

doing this with built-in backup apps in Windows isn't quite good enough

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I had to use one of those (which has a free, which has a trial?, I forget, I think I used the one with the trial version) to do a spindle to SSD clone when Ghost couldn't do it. Ghost is usually decent enough for cloning between PATA/SATA spindle disks, but apparently some SSDs it can't do.

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