Question Having problems cloning two hard drives to separate partitions of SSD and making SSD bootable.

[hoyaguru]

I have two 1TB hard drives, and figured I would switch to SSD. Only have one slot for SSD on my MB, so I got a Samsung 970 EvoPlus 2TB, figuring I could split it into two partitions, put my C: drive on one and D: drive on the other. Ran into problems when I tried to clone my C: drive to the first partition, every software I tried ignored the two SSD partitions, and cloned the had drive onto the entire 2GB of the SSD. I tried 5 different kinds of software, including two from Samsung, have had no luck. Been searching Google for 2 days without success on finding a way to do this. There are several types of software that claim they can do it, but only the pay versions, and I'm leary of paying just to find out I have the same problem.

I've been out of the computer building world for many years now, have never used an SSD before, thought I would be able to do this like I've done a hundred times before with a regular hard drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

All I want to do: Clone C: drive to first partition of the SDD and make it bootable. Clone D: drive to the second partition of the SSD. Then, use the SSD instead of the hard drives, or use the hard drives for backup.

 

[hoyaguru]

Just a note: I'm not really that slow, it's just that it takes hours for each of these programs to try to clone a 1TB hard drive. Just finished HD Clone X Free Edition, it did the same thing. I started with two partitions on the SSD, tried cloning my C: drive to the first partition, and it wiped the SSD and recreated it as one big partition. I've tried two different Samsung softwares (don't remember the name, I've since deleted them), AEOMI Partition Assistant, Macrium Reflect, and a couple of others I've since uninstalled. I also tried several of these programs a second time, but started with just the first SSD partition created, left the rest of the SSD unallocated, same thing happened. The only thing I've had luck with was AOEMI Backupper, which allows the user to clone by partition, but it did not allow me to clone my operating system to the first SSD partition (at least I don't think it did, when I tried booting with the SSD I got a BSoD with the message "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE", so I'm guessing it did not create the OS.

 

[damian101]

If your only problem is that the cloning software extends your system partition during cloning then you don't really have a problem. After cloning just unplug your old system hard drive and boot into the cloned system on the SSD. Then shrink your system partition to the desired size (I think you can use the built-in Disk Management software for that, a third-party partition manager will definitely work, I can recommend DiskGenius), which will require a reboot. Then create a new partition in your partition manager of choice and move the data from your old hard drive to the SSD.
After that just plug in your old system hard drive in while you've already booted and delete all remaining partitions on that drive. Unless you want to keep it as a backup of your old system.
I personally don't see a point in having multiple partitions on the same drive when you're just using one operating system, just creating a folder for your data seems more practical to me.

 

[hoyaguru]

Thanks damian101. I have two hard drives, with the OS on the C: Drive, and my programs installed on the D: Drive, so I need to split the SSD into two drives to emulate a C: and D: drive, otherwise my programs won't work. If I tried to do like you said, I'm pretty sure I would run into non-stop errors as everything tries to load and can't find the D: Drive.

I might have found a fix, I noticed in HD Clone X Free edition that you can choose to clone, and at the same time split the reciving drive into two partitions. I'm trying it, but according to the program, it's going to take 8 hours to complete, making this the slowest one I've tried. Once it's done, if it doesn't work, I'll try something like what you recommend. There wasn't a choice to clone the C: Drive and make the receiving drive bootable, so this might be a long wait for nothing. Going to bed, will check it when I get up.

 

[hoyaguru]

Solved! Man, that was a pain in the neck, exacerbated by two things: First, every time I tried to clone a drive, it took at least an hour or so, up to 8 hours for HD Clone X. Second, my own ignorance, I've been out of the computer world too long, this was probably a simple fix for a lot of you, but it drove me crazy for 3 days. I MIGHT have had it working right on day two, but when I tried to boot to the SSD, I kept getting an "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DRIVE" error.

So, the way I was able to do it is by using HD Clone X Free edition. When you clone a drive with this program, when you choose the destination drive, it give a little drop down menu with graphics showing different ways you can split the destination hard drive. One of those choices was to split it in half, which is what I did. In a perfect world, I would have liked to have made the new C: drive partition 750GB and the new D: drive partition the rest of the drive, but I'll live with half and half. The cloning took approximately 8 hours! Once that was done, I used AOMEI Backupper (free) which gives the choice to clone a partition to another partition to clone the old D: drive to the second partition of the SSD.

Then, I shut the PC down, disconnected the hard drives, started it up, and immediately got the "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DRIVE" error again. But, in the last three days of Google searches, I came across a forum that mentioned this problem, and how to fix it. Just keep rebooting the PC each time it comes up until you get the choice to boot into Safe Mode. Once you successfully boot into Safe Mode, don't do anything, just reboot the computer, and it should work fine. That's what I did, and it is working perfectly (and quickly!) Shut down again, reconnected the hard drives, they are now ready for formatting and being set up for backups. Hope this helps someone someday.

 

[mindless1]

I personally don't see a point in having multiple partitions on the same drive when you're just using one operating system, just creating a folder for your data seems more practical to me.

If you only have one drive in the system, the point could be that you can limit the size of the OS partition, and have a second partition, to put smaller OS partition backups on... no real need to make timely (repetitive) backups of dozens if not hundreds GB more data that doesn't change. It wastes space, takes longer to make or restore the backup.

Obviously there are other options like an external HDD or network share for backups, but KISS dictates that it's not a bad idea to have at least one copy of the backup on same system it's for, and that can't be on the same partition the OS is on since it wipes the partition to restore it.

 

[hoyaguru]

mindless1, I've always installed programs on my D: drive, so if my C: drive bit the dust I wouldn't lose all of my data, and it was a lot easier to re-install stuff. I've had the C: drive die several times over the years, and had a motherboard melt once which somehow wiped my C: drive, so it's definitely been worth doing.

 

[nosurprises]

I couple of years ago, I decided to not have a separate partition for OS because I got a bigger SSD. That was a mistake. My Windows 10 installation got weird and repair couldn't fix it. Reinstall was a pain that could've been easier with a OS partition dedicated to the OS and drivers and move all data and games to another partition/drive.