Introduction

I bought an SSD to replace classic slow HDD on home M$ Windows 10 machine. This SSD is a smaller than the original HDD (250 GB vs 500 GB) so I could not clone whole disk which I hope would be easier (anyway I will probably never know).

Initial research

Before I started I decided to check internet (DuckDuckGo) and asked how to migrate M$ Windows 10 from HDD to SSD. Sadly all I got and wasted time on were articles advertising commercial product (or features of commercial version) as free product and nothing constructive which would help me. (Such a costly system and it does not even has a migration tool.)

My second thought was to use CloneZilla as it is great tool for cloning driver in general.

Cloning

Before starting I prepared partitions on SSD in the same way as they were on the original drive apart from the one for data.

I cloned all partitions one by one, started M$ Windows rescue medium (or something of that sort) to fix the bootloader (which worked after few tries) and was happy to get to M$ Windows loading screen but than I got only blackscreen with working mouse cursor (my thoughts at the time were as follow: wtf? You can find the cursor so show me the rest!). So I searched how to fix this (maybe error during cloning, or some M$ Windows thing) but nothing helped solve my problem.

Solution

I ran out of patiance for this crazy product and downloaded installation media from the website, “burn” it on USB and installed new “clean” system on SSD. After doing so I had to code the data and install programs and set few things (it is not very customized machine). This also took a while.

Conclusion

It is probably me who was unable to find the “right” manual for migration and also me who does not understand the essence of M$ Windows.

Final thought

Commercial products suck.