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Clone second operating system to SSD

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I have 2 operating systems installed on my Windows 10 laptop C: and D: (see attachments).
When booting up I can choose between the two systems and I want to clone one of them to the new SSD (D:).

It is not possible to clone just the D: partition with Acronis True Image.

Should I clone the whole disk and delete D: on the old drive / delete C: on the new drive? I´m not sure losing the operating system choice during boot.

 

Best regards

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1 Users found this helpful

Max, welcome to these public User Forums.

Some questions to ask first for this topic:

Are you installing the new SSD internally in the laptop, i.e. does the laptop support having 2 internal drives?  I am assuming that it does given your questions in this topic!

What type of drives are involved here?  Normal laptop drives can be either 2.5" SATA drives or they can be a PCIe card type drive such as NVMe M.2 or mSCSI etc.

If the new SSD is a different drive type to the current working dual-boot OS drive, then you should install the new SSD internally but leave it as either unallocated or without any OS, to allow your current OS to detect the new drive and install any additional device drivers that may be needed for it.

I would recommend not using Cloning for this scenario, partially due to having the 2 OS's in separate partitions of a single drive, and also because it is not best suited to this type of migration.

Instead, after doing the above to register the new SSD with both of the OS systems, then make a full disk backup of your current 500GB disk drive to an external backup drive.

Next, create the Acronis Rescue Media using the 'Simple' method to create a bootable USB stick or DVD which will be WinPE based and should pick up device drivers from your host Windows Recovery Environment for all the hardware in the laptop.

Finally, boot the laptop from the Rescue Media in UEFI BIOS boot mode (to match having an EFI System partition on your 500GB drive), and restore just the D: partition to the second / new SSD.

At this point you will have 2 copies of the second OS, one on the original D: partition, and the second on the SSD using a new drive letter, i.e. E: or F: etc.

Shutdown the laptop, remove the Acronis boot media and external backup drive, then check that you are still able to boot into the first OS.

Once in the OS, you can try changing the drive letter of the D: partition to another letter such as X: (or set the partition to be hidden by removing the drive letter) and then change the SSD drive letter for the second OS to D: but it is unlikely that this would work correctly if you are booting into the second OS using the Windows Boot Manager in the EFI System Partition, as the partition identifier will have changed!

This is where it gets more complicated and you will need to use other tools to correct the BCD entries to point to the second OS on the new SSD. 

If you are using the laptop BIOS boot override menu, then you should be able to pick the SSD as the boot drive assuming that the second OS is self-contained and doesn't need to reference any data in the EFI System Partition.

You may be able to use a tool such as EasyBCD to correct the BCD entries, there is another utility EasyUEFI which might be better but is a paid application.