Moving the full operating system to a new hard drive
Moving the full operating system to a new hard drive
Cloning with Samsung Magician didn’t succeed, and Diskgenius also encountered issues during cloning. The problem often stemmed from the EFI partition not cloning correctly. It may appear fine but isn’t functioning properly. Creating a disk image results in separate partitions being made. I resolved one glitch by restoring only the EFI partition from an image. I rely on images as backups and haven’t faced any issues restoring them.
Never experienced problems cloning drives using Clonezilla. Might be due to its blocking cloning feature, essentially copying the drive as raw data without running the OS. It works across different operating systems. However, it includes optimizations to prevent issues with empty sections.
I'm uncertain but prefer formatting the drive in Windows and creating a fresh Steam library there. Alternatively, you can remove unwanted folders such as the Windows directory and other unnecessary items to reduce its size manually. You shouldn't keep the programs there permanently since they aren't linked to the new Windows registry on the main drive. You'd need to reinstall them and point them to old versions, which is risky and unpredictable. It's best to go with a clean format.