Looking for help on how to move my OS over to my SSD!

Hello everyone! I am in need of some help to move my windows 10 OS from my 1TB HDD to my 250 GB SSD! Now I know it can be done if both drives are the same size but they are not so is there any way to move only my OS over to my SSD without having to reinstall or buy a new OS or am I stuck having my OS on my HDD until I can buy a new OS? Hell if I do have to reinstall I guess it would be alright just as long as I do not lose any data on my HDD. Also my Windows 10 (originally windows 8.1) is an OEM version that came pre-installed on my PC when I bought it so I have no OS disc. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this!

Easiest way to do it is to use Acronis, it's not a free program but that doesn't stop most people. I'm not sure if the newer versions have a drive clone option, or if you have to make an image and then restore it to the new drive. If it doesn't give you the option to do so during restore, you should be able to expand the partition to the full drive size after moving it.

Ok I will give it a try and share results after.

Sorry I didn't specify earlier, expanding the partition size is done in the windows disk management utility.. it used to be found from the run prompt by typing diskmgmt.msc, it works on 8.1 so win 10 should still have it.

Well I am in the process of backing up the windows files (I hope those are the right files) to the SSD now in an attempt to restore the OS onto the SSD but if this does not work I will just have to wait until I get my new HDD so I can move most files over to that than use the Samsung cloning software I have to move the remaining OS to my SSD... I just did not want to wait any longer haha.

ehhh I did not realize that I would need to buy a new SSD for my OS... haha damn looks like I will have to wait to change over my OS not enough space on my current SSD. Thanks anyways though and when I do finally get a new SSD I will look over this thread once more! Have a great day :D

just get yourself an external drive, works just the same, or hook up another internal drive, I think 60$ will get you at least 2TB now days. Acronis images the whole drive, and that is the option you want to use. There is no need for you to separately backup anything. You have to transfer all partitions for windows to function properly.. otherwise you may as well just load a fresh copy of windows on the SSD.

Personally I haven't put an SSD on my desktop yet because of price, storage size, and life span. I run my OS on a 2TB drive, and have 4 more 2TB drives in raid50 which I install all of my games loaded to. It gives me 6TB of storage and I can lose a drive without losing data, plug another in and its back up to 100% health. I get the benefit of speed and redundancy for my data and game play. 5x 2TB drives cost me I think around $300 when I purchased them.

I already bought myself a new HDD to upgrade my current HDD and so I can have a dedicated HDD for video recording. for my SSD I got the Samsung 850 EVO 230 some GB of space on it and use that for games that are larger than about 45 gigs the rest is all on my main HDD but I would like to start using an SSD for my OS for faster boots (boots in a timely manner now I just want things to work faster I guess haha). I still have yet to mess with the raid options (not sure if I would need a different MOBO or not still new to PC building haha) but I want to wait till I get a new MOBO and CPU for that and that is when I will buy me a fresh copy of Windows so I will probably wait until than to do that I suppose.