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Hi there,

I'm trying to copy my Win 10 install onto a larger drive. The source partition of Win 10 is 195GB in size and the destination drive is 500GB in size. I want to use the whole of that drive as my system drive.

When i clone to the new drive it only creates a partition the size of the source partition onto the new drive, which leaves nearly 300GB unallocated. I'm unable to extend this new primary partition into the unallocated space because the EFI partition is in the way and i can't seem to extend past it.

How do i use the whole of this new drive as a single partition for my new system drive? Or how do i move this EFI partition to be infront of the primary partition so i can extend the primary partition into the unallocated space? Is cloning even the right method to use? Can anyone explain how i can do what i want?

Thanks.

It is very odd that the EFI partition is in the way. Normally the EFI partition comes first.

Have you tried using Clonezilla?

You want Macrium Reflect. It can clone, copy and re-size the drive's partitions all in one step.
https://www.macrium.com/

LIke JBI, I'm also suprised the EFI partition is in the way. Is it first on the original drive (e.g. via sfdisk -l via a linux live cd/thumbdrive)? It may be worth seeing if gparted will let you move and resize.

You could perhaps also try first setting the partitions as desired on the new drive e.g. via cfdisk /dev/sdb, and then copy over each partition individually e.g. dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=8MB or the like. Just make sure you know what's going where before running a command like that, as a mistake could mean overwritten data.

The free/trial version of Reflect will handle everything. Tech Report subscribers can get a discount on the paid versions of Reflect (assuming that the discount program has been updated for 2018).

Thanks for responses. I didn't try clonezilla. I've tried easeUS and macrium, although judging by the posts above it looks like i missed some options that macrium gives for moving/resizing etc. I'll have another look tomorrow.

The EFI partition is also after the primary partition on the source drive. I didn't do anything special with original install. Just clicked install with a Windows image onto a new drive.

Cheers.

That's just bizarre. Every EFI system disk I've ever seen (Windows and Linux) has had the EFI partition first.

I didn't run into any problems using Reflect over the holidays, but at times in the past (though I might have been using Acronis TrueImage rather than Macrium Reflect at that time), I had to add the first and second partitions to the copy queue, re-size the second partition (leaving just enough space at the end), and THEN add the third partition to the copy instruction.

I couldn't wait and had to try now, and it's done! I used Reflect and just dragged and dropped the partitions where i wanted them and resized with the partition options. I didn't realise this could be done when i tried it previous. Cool program.

just brew it! wrote:

That's just bizarre. Every EFI system disk I've ever seen (Windows and Linux) has had the EFI partition first.

Yeah i thought it was kinda weird when looking at it. How strange i thought that the installer would think this was a good idea...

Thinking about it more i think i may have an explanation. Or maybe just information that might explain something to someone. I initially installed Win 10 onto the drive with a partition the size of the drive. I then shrunk that partition when i wanted to dual boot and put another copy of Windows onto the new partition. However, on boot up it made this new install the primary boot copy, so i changed it in msconfig back to my original install being the primary boot. Sometime later i deleted the other Windows installation but i never changed the boot order back to default. So yeah, maybe this explains something.

Anyway, job done. Thank you all!

ien wrote:

Thinking about it more i think i may have an explanation. Or maybe just information that might explain something to someone. I initially installed Win 10 onto the drive with a partition the size of the drive. I then shrunk that partition when i wanted to dual boot and put another copy of Windows onto the new partition. However, on boot up it made this new install the primary boot copy, so i changed it in msconfig back to my original install being the primary boot. Sometime later i deleted the other Windows installation but i never changed the boot order back to default. So yeah, maybe this explains something.

I wondered, but earlier you indicated it was a new install on a new disk. A disk with a legacy partition structure makes more sense, and usually this kind of thing happens when a disk has been upgraded to Win10 in-place from an earlier 7/8 installation -- it's faster and less risky for the installer to shrink the main partition and append the extra stuff Win10 needs, than to move everything around.

If you ever reinstall again, one of the earliest screens of the installer has an option to choose the installation destination. Click it, and you get a screen where you can manage partitions. At that point, I delete all of them and then continue with a blank disk. Win10 will automatically create a new partition structure and the UEFI/recovery stuff gets correctly placed at the front.

ien wrote:

Thanks for responses. I didn't try clonezilla. I've tried easeUS and macrium, although judging by the posts above it looks like i missed some options that macrium gives for moving/resizing etc. I'll have another look tomorrow.

Yeah, run into that problem with Macrium myself a few times since I use it infrequently. It's a powerful tool but not the most clear when selecting configuration settings.

I've stated my appreciation of Macrium Reflect in the past (in fact, well in the past). The UI makes it easy to do things that make me think "There's no way this is going to work; it can't possibly be able to do that, can it?" and it does it with no fuss. I've never had any data loss with it, but it's software I only use maybe once a year at most so I haven't given it much chance to get me into trouble, and it's definitely in that category of software that I hesitate recommending to people who clearly don't know what they're doing.

ludi wrote:

around.
If you ever reinstall again, one of the earliest screens of the installer has an option to choose the installation destination. Click it, and you get a screen where you can manage partitions. At that point, I delete all of them and then continue with a blank disk. Win10 will automatically create a new partition structure and the UEFI/recovery stuff gets correctly placed at the front.

Yes, i normally would have done this if i was installing onto a clean drive (and i did initially), but i then did a secondary install onto a drive with an existing partition for the purpose of dual booting. So i need to shrink the existing partition and then install into the newly created unallocated space, at which point i'm guessing the Win installer installed a new EFI partition for this new install, which is therefore going to be after that first install.

Going by my experience on this, I think to maintain a logical partition structure on a hard drive when dual booting you need to do it on 2 separate drives, and then just hop into the BIOS on boot if you want to change the drive you're booting from. Either that or the installer needs to know about the existing install so it doesn't install an EFI partition for the secondary install that you're doing and just uses the original one.