6/5/15

Cloning HDD to a smaller SSD for a Windows 8 Laptop

My win8 Dell Laptop has a 500GB HDD, I bought a 480GB SSD for hard disk replacement.  Unfortunately, the 500GB HDD's partitions span the whole disk, the exact layout copying wasn't possible.

I formatted the SSD to a GPT disk, then use various cloning softwares to do the cloning.  I tried Macrium Reflect Free, EaseUS Partition Master, Minitool Partition Wizard. None of them get me to Windows startup screen.

The last one I used is Minitool Partition Wizard. During boot, it said can't find OS.  So I tried changing different bios settings out of desperation and hoped one would work.  It did.

The setting is "disable virtualization".  I don't know why it worked, it doesn't make any sense, I'm just glad it did.

So if you have problem migrating HDD to SSD, this might be something you can try.