Solved How to Migrate OS to new Hard disk.

[schwinn8]

Great post. Now if you have found Macrium Reflect Free addition all that would have been accomplished in about 3 steps 2 of which would physically installing and removing physical drives. Well add one to turn off rapid mode so that all your data would be back on your hard drive not in system RAM.

Thank you Clintlgm, your recommendation of Macrium worked beautifully on my HP with Win8.1 and various recovery partitions. I'll admit I didn't boot into the WINRE and the HP Recovery drives yet, but both are working properly (the HP Recovery app doesn't crash, as it would when the partition was messed up, and Windows allows me to create the recovery drive with my OEM recovery data as well (the option isn't greyed out).

Macrium is free, and does exactly what it's supposed to. I had played with Easus for a while, and couldn't get it to behave... it wasn't setting up the BCD properly, whereas Macrium did it perfectly. Thank you!

For those keeping score, on my Win8.1 setup, I tried Paragon (various versions, all free/demo), Easeus, and some others. Macrium was the ONLY one that worked. Note, in the case of Paragon, most of the versions I got refused to operate at all - they were demos or something, but didn't want to actually do anything. Paragon 12 (which was highly recommended) simply sat there spinning the drives, but doing nothing (kept saying it was "preparing" but after 10 minutes I gave up...). Paragon paid may work, but when FREE Macrium works so well, why bother?!

Thanks again, Clintlgm... I registered here just to reply and thank you!

EDIT: Tried to boot into HP recovery via F11 during bootup... and I was given a bluescreen which means the BCD is probably incorrect. Oh well... still, at least the machine works immediately after the copy/clone. Easeus and others would leave me with a bad BCD on all partitions, and an un-bootable machine. So, at least Macrium works and gets me into Windows... now to figure out how to get me back to HP Recovery (or WINRE which I haven't tested yet).

 

[elbmek]

Does not open, I tried rtl audio servvice exe and the rtl x64 - nothing!

 

[TangoPapaActual]

Hi. I'm loosing my mind on a similar issue. I have an HDD that came with restore partitions and windows partition. I mistakenly only migrated the windows partion (c:/) and did not copy the restore partitions. So....
Now I need to:
1. migrate the windows partition BACK from the SSD to the HDD. (this is the problem)
2. start up off the HDD.
3. Do a factory restore. (my virgin install isn't as well done as the manufacturers, its a 3D game machine)
4. Use the HDD to SSD migration tool from Intel to migrate ALL the partitions together back over to the SSD.

So, my question to you is: What freeware is available to migrate my win partition BACK to an HDD, and set that as the boot volume?
(thanks in advance)

 

[ddadda82]

Just wondering if the said Paragon Software today can still do migration from bigger HDD to smaller HDD with GPT partition for free version?

 

[elbmek]

In Windows 8 Manager (software) there is an option for 'super copy' all you have to do is enter the destination. It may be the answer