Part 2 – Cloning the HDD to the SSD
This is part 2 of my instructions for transforming your old laptop (or desktop) running Windows 7 into a Windows 10 version that works. Today we are going to prepare the new hard drive.
We purchased a 2.5″ HDD enclosure. Following the instructions that came with it, slide the plastic cover. Insert the new SSD, making sure its the right side up so that the connector engages properly. Replace the cover. You now have a new USB external drive that you can connect to your laptop using the USB cable supplied.
Connect it to one of the USB port of the laptop. Let windows 7 recognise the external hard drive and load the driver. When you can see the device, ensure that the SDD is formatted. If it isn’t, then go to “Computer Management” and “Storage” and format it.
Now download the “Samsung Data Migration Software for Consumer SSD” v3.1 from this site onto your laptop:
https://samsung-data-migration.software.informer.com/3.1/
Normally, as per their instructions, you would download it from the Samsung site:
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools
But Samsung only has the new version 4.0 on their site at the moment, and it did not recognise my slightly “older” 860 serie SSD. This is a big miss by Samsung not to have left a link to v3.1! (how did I work that out? well experience from having done it before many times!)
Now use the software to clone your laptop’s hard drive onto the external USB drive, by following the instructions from Samsung. Note that you need to make sure that the USB drive has a larger capacity than the amount of data you are using on your laptop. If not, you need to remove some data files (music, video, photos) before performing the operation, or you should have bought a larger SSD !
- Select the source disk: your laptop’s hard drive
- Select the target disk: the USB drive
- Press Start
This will take a little while, depending on how much data you have. It will effectively transfer everything from your laptop onto the USB drive, making it an exact copy (a clone).
In my next post, I will explain how to physically swap the hard drives in your computer.