Correctly clone a Laptop GPT HD to an SSD

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c627627
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Joined: Fri Sep 30, 2016 9:22 am

Correctly clone a Laptop GPT HD to an SSD

Post by c627627 »

Here is what a 750GB laptop hard drive partition table looks like.
As you can see, Windows C Drive takes about 60GB, the other two partitions are just for data.

[attachment=0]750GBGPT.png[/attachment]

Since the 60GB Windows 8 C Drive partition can easily fit onto a 128GB SSD with room to spare, it should be theoretically possible to make a full switch.

If you look at the picture above, I made four separate image files of
1. WINRE
2. EFI system partition
3. Microsoft Reserved Partition
4. C Drive.


Formatting the 128GB SSD as GPT immediately creates SSD's own Microsoft Reserved Partition as first partition.
Cloning the other partitions from those image files still results in SSD not booting in.
Clearing everything and imaging all four onto the SSD, still results in SSD not booting in.


Now I resolved the problem by nuking the SSD partition table, formatting it as MBR, simply creating a System Reserved Partition (active) with BCD info in it, and then just having one other partition, the C Drive Windows 8 partition. This made SSD boot in with just those two partitions...


But I am still wondering how to correctly do this if I wanted to format the SSD as GPT, and fully clone everything with that EFI partition on there too.
If the SSD is formatted as MBR, I can access System Reserved Partition (active) with EasyBCD software and "tell it" to use C Drive OS partition as Windows 8 partition.
I notice I cannot access the EFI partition with EasyBCD because there is no way to assign a drive letter to that partition.

So how do people clone GPT drives correctly and how do they edit BCD info if the Laptop drive is connected to a PC for editing?
Thank you for your advice.
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