Switching primary harddrives

Chary

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Okay, so I have a question. I've got a PC with windows 10, and I've got a 120GB hdd as the one that has the OS and everything. I want to replace it with a 1TB hdd (I already have 3 other 1TB hdds in the PC). How can I manage this, without losing all my windows settings, or tweaks or such? I assume I can't just copy all the data to the other drive and boot from it like normal? What's my best option, short of re-doing windows installation all over again?
 

FAST6191

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For hard drives (and partitions) bigger than the former it is easy enough. It is when going to smaller drives (usually I want to put it on my shiny new SSD) that it gets a bit more tricky.

No you can't copy.
You will want hard drive cloning tools

http://clonezilla.org/ is free and easy enough to use (not quite "click this, click that, wait" but if you can follow on screen instructions it will do it) and is what I use for backups and hard drive swaps I am not simultaneously doing a restore for.

You may also have to go into your BIOS and set the boot drive, and depending upon your setup you might also to set a flag on the drive to boot but that is easy enough.
 
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