Cloning Windows 8 to new SSD

Bought an Asus N550JV and need to clone the OS to the new SSD. I purchased a USB to SATA adapter to use for cloning. Asus divided my single hard drive into two partitions C for the OS and D labeled as DATA, for a total of 1TB. Can I just clone C which has the OS? There is no recovery partition on the drive at all. They rely on the built-in restore of Windows 8. Which software would be best to use for the least issues? Do I have to clone it as it is from factory or can I kill off all the bloatware and then clone? Any BIOS changes I need to make? I'm installing the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB drive.

Thanks for the help,

Rob

 

You can clone the recovery partition on the SSD if you want to, the partition is hidden to the Windows file explorer, but is usually visible to cloning software. If there is nothing on D:\, no need to clone it and if it's just user data, again no need to clone it, you can just transfer the files afterwards.

You shouldn't need to change anything in the BIOS either, it should already be set to AHCI.

 

Thanks for the info. I should be all set to go.

 

Have done lots of work with Easeus Todo over the years (current is 6.0), don't know if it's the best but have worked great here. Does alignment (optimize for SSD) and allows clone to smaller capacity drives.

 

You can't just clone the C: system partition, you have to clone also the first one which is an EFI system partition (300MB) which contains boot infos ??? Am i right ?

I have also an asus N550JV and what a mess, look at windows disk management picture and then Easus todo one. There is more partitions on easus. Restore system partition everywhere lol.

 

^^^^ lol, same here on a Toshiba, have tried (after doing quite some research, and using a cloned test HD) to cut down on all the partitions (7 of them) and moving boot files around, but failed miserably (no boot). W8 + uefi gpt bios etc = need to go back to school. But the Easeus cloning itself worked fine, and had no problem making a fully working copy of my original HD.

 

Ok, thanks for the heads up on all the partitions. I didn't think the N550JV had any since it relies on the ability to reinstall Windows 8 using the Windows 8 built-in restore similar to the way you can do it with Windows 7. I restored a N550JV touch model that I am returning using this method. But I have a feeling it relied on one of those hidden partitions to do this after seeing your post. So can I still use the built-in restore without copying over the Asus partitions? Can I just clone the 300mb and C: partition and have a bootable drive?

Rob

 

I'm ..somewhat confident that if the uefi partition (with asus' bootloader on it), and the recovery partition, are present - that you can just boot normally and trigger the recovery boot, yes.

Just the c: partition and the boot-partition windows will always create will very likely not work. Neither if you picked those partitions out of a gpt-partition (then it will croak, most likely not boot at all), or if they were designated that way as a primary/active partition setup (in which case you would need to designate those partitions the right way, and somehow have the partition table recognize it - this isn't necessarily as trivial as it sounds).