How to move everything from a small system drive to bigger ssd in Windows 10

Question

I have a notebook with a small system disk (32GB) and an additional 160GB ssd drive. Windows can be installed only on the small drive.

I would like to move everything to the bigger drive to free up space on the smaller.

Could you please recommend what to move and how?

Answer 1

One easy and (usually) painless way of moving things is a combination of copying and leaving NTFS junction points in their place, so that anything that expects things to be where they were would still "think" it's there.

Assuming your 32GB disk is C:, let's say you have a folder called C:\Data you want to move to D:\Data. In that case, run these commands in Command Prompt (depending on the current setup, you may need to run as Administrator):

1. Copy the original data: robocopy "C:\Data" "D:\Data" /E /COPYALL /XJ
2. Delete the original data: rmdir "C:\Data" /S /Q
3. Create a junction where the original was to point to the new location: mklink /J "C:\Data" "D:\Data"

You probably don't want to do this for most "standard" folders though:

• C:\Windows can't be moved due to the fact Windows' boot process doesn't support junctions.
• C:\Program Files, C:\Program Files (x86) and C:\Users can be moved, but will break Windows upgrades.
• In addition, moving C:\Users will break Windows Store.

Because of this, I recommend you only move the things that take the most space, rather than the whole of Users of Program Files. WinDirStat can be help pinpoint what those things are.

Finally, hiberfil.sys can't be moved, but can be disabled and the page file can be moved through settings.

Answer 2

You cannot move the partition to another disk. For now, i suggest you back up all important data. And then do a clean install on SSD according to this guide:

https://www.disk-partition.com/articles/windows-wont-install-on-ssd-4348i.html

Answer 3

I would say that if you can't custom install your newer programs to your D drive your only other choice is to move the page file and all your data over to the new drive, and see how much space you have then.

If it were me I would purchase a bigger C drive along with a good backup program that allows you to create an expanded backup onto a new bigger drive and swap it that way.

Some types of drives even comes with this software included. I don't claim to know anything about your specific computer, but I have done this many times over the years with various systems.