Moving Windows 10 from HDD to a SSD drive on my laptop.

Background

I was convinced that having a SSD drive is far much better than an old magnetic HDD. Once you have it setup that is definitely true, but I was afraid from past experiences that the process of moving Windows to another machine could be painful. 

Are the benefits of the SSD speed going to overcome the time and effort spent in moving the Operating System?.

First, let me say that the Laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad 320 with a Windows 10 preinstalled. It was a very good deal, costing 560EUR with a HDD of 1 Tbyte. The carton box contains only a user manual of a few pages. No CD or DVD with a Windows or a recovery disk. No Windows license document. Probably the reason is that the laptop has no CD or DVD drive unit but it is a bit frustrating anyway.

In principle that laptop has a special partition structure for recovery. The structure of the disk is very confusing with 5 partitions (3 hidden). All using the new partition schema called GPT. I did not what to loose the Windows licence or the capability to recover the Windows from future crisis.

I anticipated problems since the HDD was 1Tbyte big but the Samsung 860 EVO disk was only 500Gbytes (100EUR) that will be enough for editing some document and preparing presentations.

Hardware

I have a SATA docker stations that can be connected to a USB

Failure 1

Windows 10 provides a backup image control panel to save your drive and restore it later. The procedure that I followed was inspired by this:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-10/84fa6683-e3ac-4e93-9139-368af9267869
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/how-to-restore-a-windows-10-system-image-to-an/e20992ca-5641-4f7c-bb09-3895d0732162
To anticipate a disaster I used the Windows Disk Manager to reduce the size of the Windows partition from ~800 to ~400 Gb. I needed to defrag the disk first and the Windows defrag failed to make it compact enough. I discovered the Puran Defrag that did a perfect job.

To do this procedure, I needed and extra old disk of 160Gb to save the image temporarily. The idea was to create the image, replace the disk drive in the laptop and restore it back using a old USB memory stick with a Windows 10 setup ready to be used.

Nevertheless it was a complete disaster that ended in the error 0x80042412. After some trials and googles, I gave up.

Failure 2

Everybody seems to recommend the EasyUS. In principle is able to clone the complete disk but in practice it failed to create all partitions that my Lenovo has.
The advantage of this method is that it does not require an intermediate disk and you can plug the SSD in the Docker
I tried to add them with another tool called AOMEI partition assistance Standard edition I has able to replicate the other partitions.
The result was a complete failure. When the SSD drive was connected to the laptop Windows failed to boot

Success method

A bit desperate, I found another partition tool that could be useful to try to manipulate something?. I found the Minitool Partition Wizard that has a free version. This tool seems very complete (for a free version) that allow to change the TypeID of a new GPT partitions to declare that a partition is a windows recovery partition or a system partition etc.

Suddenly I realize that there is a HDD to SSD button. I connected to the SSD to my USB docker and started the process immediately. The application allows for copying all partitions in a drive that you are going to replace and dynamically change sizes of partitions. It is not capable of cloning the Windows C: directly in the graphical user interface but it offers to reboot to a old fashion text interface and continues without any questions.

In the end, it was that fastest method I have tried and the most transparent. All partitions were cloned and seem identical in the GUI. Windows is also happy with the result and the SSD drive boots perfectly.

Great tool! Thanks!.