Subscribe now and choose from over 30 free gifts worth up to £49 - Plus get £25 to spend in our shop
OK - got a "HP Pavilion b005sa 14" Ultrabook" that is now over four years old but having put an SSD in as the main hard drive it has lived on longer than I'd have expected as is fine for what I need.
It has always had a 32Gb SSD C: drive for booting up alongside the original conventional HDD for storage but now this C: drive is too small for me to carry out any W10 updates no matter how careful I am about installing to the bigger SSD when given the option (eg. MS Office won't).
My question is now whether I can reinstall W10 onto the larger SSD and in turn rename that as the C: drive somehow.
I like the laptop, I don't want another laptop all the while it works, but I'd ideally like to apply updates when they're available and that's not possible at the moment...
You can copy the Win 10 installation to a bigger drive and then put that drive back in to the machine as the primary hard drive. Common thing to do when you go from a conventional drive to SSD.
OK cheers - of course, the "bigger drive" is already IN the laptop, and the C: drive (with Windows on it) is some sort of solid state bit of RAM somewhere on the motherboard I presume; there's definitely not two HDD sized things inside the laptop (I've had it open a few times!).
How does one "copy the Win 10 installation" over then? Surely it's not just a case of copying the Windows folder??
Edit: don't worry, I'm on it now, you've given me the steer needed cheers.
I wouldn't bother. Just reinstall it from a bootable USB and pick the relevant destination drive when prompted during the install.
Copying partitions about is useful when you want to keep your existing running gear but it's prone to difficulties.
[s]Just trying to do this now, going to the "[url= https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 ]Windows 10 Installation Medi[/url]a" page however when I try and create the USB installation thing it bangs on about how I don't have 8gb on my C: drive (duh, I know, that's why I'm doing this!) and terminates and there is nothing leading up to that that looks like an option that might change it.
Any ideas anyone? I can't even get to the point where I try and install anything yet because I don't seem able to create the installation media... Is there an alternative way to create it?[/s]
OK, worked out how to boot off the USB drive (thought I'd wiped it but I hadn't, it was still there).
Now won't let me install onto the SSD saying "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks."
Does that translate to "format your SSD and get rid of the partitions please"?
Yes.