Skip to main content

OS & boot on 2nd (D:) drive

Thread needs solution

My current Windows system has two HDD hard drives, marked as C: and D:. The OS  and boot are both on the second drive (D:). How should I transfer both drives to new SSD drives?

Thanks!

0 Users found this helpful

Earl, welcome to these public User Forums.

I would suspect that your OS was installed with the disk drives not installed in the recommended motherboard port connections.  The OS normally is installed to Disk 0 that in turn is connected to SATA port 0 - this may have occurred because the OS was installed before the second HDD was added to the PC.

If all is working as things are now, then the simplest method of migrating the existing drives to SSD's is to do the following:

First & important: make full disk backups of both current working HDD drives.  Store the backup on a third, external storage drive if available!

Next, if you haven't already done so, create the Acronis bootable rescue media on USB media or a DVD disc, and test that you understand how to boot your computer from this media.

The further steps depend on the approach you want to take and the type of PC you have?

If you have a Desktop / Tower type computer, then you could use Cloning to make a duplicate copy of each HDD to a new SSD of sufficient size to hold all the data (and leave at least 20% free space available).  Note: you should not attempt to boot into Windows with the original HDD and cloned SSD both connected after the clone process has completed - doing so can lead to a disk signature clash and may cause corruption.

If you have a Laptop / Notebook type computer, then I would not recommend using Cloning, but to use the alternative Backup & Recovery method using the Acronis bootable rescue media and with the new SSD installed in the PC.  Doing this one at a time to remove one HDD and restore the Backup of that HDD to the new installed SSD, then booting from that SSD to ensure all is working before then repeating the process for the next HDD.

See KB 63226: Acronis True Image 2020: how to create bootable media and KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

KB 61665: Acronis True Image 2019, 2020 and 2021: Active Cloning in Windows

KB 63295: Acronis True Image 2020: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media