I've been troubleshooting some issues with my old hard drives: one is an HP 250GB SSD that I use for the system, and the other is a WD Black 2TB that's used for game storage. I've noticed both drives often hit 100% usage in the task manager right after startup and when downloading or updating anything on Steam. I've recently purchased a new 4TB M.2 drive from WD and want to transfer everything from the old drives to this new one. I'm not exactly sure about the process or what terms I should be searching for online to get started. I suspect I'll need a cloning program or something similar. Any suggestions? Oh, and I'm running Windows 11. Thanks!
4 Answers
Try using Niubi, a free cloning and partition software. It lets you clone your boot drive over to the new M.2 and then you can easily transfer files from the other drive. Si it clones, you can also expand the partition size during the process, which is a nice bonus!
If you're comfortable with it, check out some drive partitioning commands in Linux too. They can be really powerful for this kind of work!
Big thanks to everyone for the advice! After a long 6 hours and some tech support from my friend in IT, I finally managed to clone the drive over to my new M.2. I did mess up the partitions a bit and corrupted the GPT header in the process, but I ended up doing a fresh Windows install and now everything's working perfectly!
You might want to look into cloning your system drive using Macrium Reflect. However, reinstalling Windows 11 from scratch can be pretty quick and easy, and that's what I would do. This way, you can configure everything fresh without dragging along old junk files. Just use the 2TB drive as a backup for important files. It’s like having a clean slate before a big move!
Totally! Doing a clean install from a USB can help avoid all sorts of issues.