I need to move Windows 10 from a hard drive to a solid state drive

I recently built another desktop computer with 3 drives, one of which is from my old computer. I want to move my Windows install to the new solid state drive without losing all of my files on the old drive. I have looked into image copying software but it all looks risky. My latest plan was to mount the Windows 10 ISO to a flash drive, uninstall my old drive, install Windows on the SSD, and then plug in my old drive and uninstall Windows from it.

Can anyone validate this plan or provide a possibly easier alternative?

Answer

Whilst I am not affiliated with the folks over at How to Geek.com, they do have an excellent tutorial on how to do exactly what you are trying to do.

The best part is that the software they suggest using is free and also includes recovery media functionality to fix any problems that might arise - usually very minor problems to do with the MBR (Master Boot Record) and BCD (Boot Configuration Data); these appear serious as they prevent booting of the OS, but are easy to rectify, especially using the software in this example: Macrium Reflect Free

The link to the How to Geek tutorial is here:

How to Upgrade Your Existing Hard Drive in Under an Hour

Under normal circumstances I would go through the steps of the process in shorthand for you, however I believe their explanation is particularly good in this case, and your concerns about the risk of drive cloning are more likely to be eased with a more in depth approach, as found above.

I wish you a smooth transition to your shiny new SSD!

EDIT:

As we are only wanting to move the OS to the new drive and not all files due to reduced storage capacity, things are a little different.

If we think of your HDD as containing two groups of files this will be easier to explain: System-Attached files and Data-Storage files. System-Attached files are programs, their dependencies and Windows itself - only a clone operation will preserve their function. Note that many programs make use of save/config files that you can restore from backup, which can be considered as Data-Storage files, these are files which aren't tied to the current OS - basically anything you could put on a memory stick and still use on as normal.

The only way to not have to reinstall programs is to remove as many of your data-storage files as you can (backed up) to make the contents of the HDD small enough to clone to the SSD. You can then format the HDD and copy all your Data-storage files over to it and use your HDD as (you guessed it) data-storage only. If you have a separate partition for Windows/System-Attached files there is an alternative, but many of us don't.