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Beginners tutorial on making a copy of Win-10 operating system

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I've used computers since they first appeared on the market. But still a beginner in understanding some computer terms. The 1-TB SATA HD in my laptop needs replacing. I want to replace with a 1-TB SSD. 1. What is best way to accomplish? Clone? Make a bootable CD using rescue media? Use Acronis backup to Cloud using the "disks and partitions" option. Make an ISO? 2. Does "disks and partitions" option or ISO copy just the WIN-10 operating system, or everything in the partition?

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Thomas, the first actions that you need to perform are as follows:

  1. Make a full Disk & Partitions backup of the current 1TB Sata HDD drive to an external drive.
  2. Make the Acronis Rescue Media using the integrated media creation tool and use the Simple method.  Make this on a USB stick (2GB min, 32GB max size) - this will be reformatted as FAT32 so do not use one with any data you want to keep!
  3. Run the msinfo32 program in Windows and make a note of what is shown for the BIOS mode used by your Windows OS to boot the system.  This is the same mode that you will need to use for the rescue media when booting.
  4. Test that you know how to boot your computer from the USB media and can do so just for the testing process.

See the following reference documents:

KB 63252: Acronis True Image 2020: how to back up files or disks

KB 63226: Acronis True Image 2020: how to create bootable media

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk

KB 61665: Acronis True Image 2019 and 2020: Active Cloning in Windows