Win10 cloning a drive under different system

I have a win10 fresh install on an HP pavillion laptop (1tb)drive and i added a second drive( 250g) with my old OS (vista64 home)

Now i want to move the 250 gigs of my old system to the new drive but I dont want it to boot to the old os.I want it to still boot with WIN10 ... any suggestions? ( if this is in the wrong thread i apologize)



Holydiver

Use MiniTool Partition Wizard to shrink your Windows 10 partition to create an unallocated space equal to the size of the OS partition on your old hard drive, then copy just the OS partition of your old hard to the unallocated space.

Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Free

Or, use Macrium Reflect Free to create an image of the old hard drive saved as an image file to your new hard drive. Then use the explore image function of Macrium Reflect to assign a virtual drive letter to your old OS partition contained within the image.

Macrium Reflect Free

Or, there are ways to capture the OS partition of your old hard drive as a vhd file and then run that vhd file as a virtual machine inside Windows 10, but I'm not too experienced with that.

i have a 1 tb of space do i really need to shrink the win10 install partition? Also i have the 250gb drive full thats why it stopped working
(vista ran out of room) I dont care if the vista os doesnt boot

i have a 1 tb of space do i really need to shrink the win10 install partition?

If you don't shrink the Windows 10 partition then where would you clone the Windows Vista hard drive to? Cloning means to copy an existing partition or multiple partitions from one disc to another exactly as they are. That means a new partition will be created on the new hard drive which will end up being a copy of the partition on the old hard drive. In order to create a new partition, the disk must contain the empty space to create the partition in.

Imaging means you take the contents of a partition on a drive and transfer it to a single file - from which that partition can be recreated later. Most imaging programs also provide a means to explore the contents of the image by mounting the image file as a virtual drive. You get a drive letter, let's say F:, that looks like a regular partition/drive but it is really just the contents of the image file. Usually exploring the image that way is read only, you can view/copy files out of the image but can't change files on the image or write new files to it.

Apparently Marcium Reflect is 530mbs in size.. thats awful big for a imaging program i will have to keep looking

Apparently Marcium Reflect is 530mbs in size.. thats awful big for a imaging program i will have to keep looking

Since you aren't making a backup image of your operating system for restoration later in the event of failure, there is an option during the setup to download the Macrium Relfect program only and not the PE component. The PE component is only needed to make the Macrium Rescue disk. Without the PE component it's a little over 40 MB in size.

As you stated in post #3, though, you have a 1 TB drive. So, even at 530 MB for the entire Macrium Reflect with PE install that's roughly 0.05% used space of your disk.

This might work better for you, though. It will create a .vhd file which can be mounted as a read/write virtual drive:
Disk2vhd

I went ahead with installed since as you said the 530mb little more than half a gig. I will just delete it after the install ..I'm just waiting for the image to be saved so we will see how it goes ...I also created the rescue dvd for win10..

Gonna give this a try
Thanx
Holydiver

You have to leave Macrium installed to mount the image, unfortunately. But you can uninstall it, and then re-install selecting to download and install the program only and not the PE component.

Okay I will