Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
2 Posts
0
100710
XPS 15 9550 - Can I clone the recovery partition from the HDD to a new MSATA SSD?
My new XPS came with a 1TB SSD and the 32GB SSD. I want to remove both the HDD and SSD and just install a new 500 GB MSATA drive. Reading around online, it sounds like people have issues copying Dell's recovery partition over to new drives. Ideally, I would like the new MSATA SSD to be a perfect copy of the factory drive I got from Dell, including the recovery partition, so I can restore as I normally would with the original drive from Dell. Is this currently possible? I spoke with a colleague who does this sort of thing for a living and he mentioned off-hand that the data migration software the comes with Samsung SSDs can definitely clone the recovery partition over, but does anyone know if this will work for sure?
I really don't want to lose the recovery partition.
sourdough35
2 Posts
0
February 16th, 2016 08:00
Figured it out. There may be a few imaging/cloning programs that work, but I found Macrium Reflect's free version did the job perfectly (I tried some others unsuccessfully). You can use the clone or imaging function with a secondary disk connected and just make sure to move every single partition to the new disk in the same order they appear on the factory disk. Then I re-cloned the cloned drive into the SSD back in my laptop. Pulled out the original factory drive to test and it booted into windows 10 off the new SSD. Then to verify, I booted into the windows recovery menu and selected restore from factory image. It's worked a few times!
Note - this may break the f8 boot menu with all the advanced boot options. You can still boot into it from Windows 10, and you can also force the menu on booting by turning the computer on and off a few times while it attempts to boot (not optimal, could harm your files).
If anyone has ideas on how to fix F8 now, I'd be set.