Clone or upgrade first, and old drive partition manipulation?

[David Armstrong3]

History:
I bought an HP desktop with a 2T hdd, windows 8.1. I cloned windows and recovery to a 128G ssd then partitioned the hdd into several drives: one for photos, one for music, one for programs, etc.

Present:
I purchased a 256G ssd and want to upgrade to windows 10 but I'm not sure which to do first. Should i clone 8.1 to the new ssd then do the upgrade to W10 or upgrade first and then install the new ssd?

question two, in three parts:
I will be removing the 128G ssd from my tower once i have upgraded the drive and windows. Should i clone the ssd onto my hdd? if so, will i need 256G of space to clone it? (my clone partition on the hdd is only 128G). Can i change the size of the partitions on my hdd without affecting other data?

Thanks for any advice

 

[TechFreak1]

You can use the SSD migration wizard to clone the 128 gig ssd to the 256 ssd.

However are they the same brand or different?

You can also use the freeware - easeus partition manager (home edition).

I would recommend cloning the 128 ssd onto the 256 ssd then upgrading the 256 ssd just incase something happens. As this way you have your old Windows 8.1 install intact.

Recently during a clean install I made a silly mistake when creating a new bootable usb key, the mistake occurred when I selected GPT for UEFI before I selected the .iso.

So what happened was that it defaulted to MBR when I selected the .iso so blissfully unaware I created the usb key as I did my chores and went ahead deleted all the partitions except the data partition.

At that point I realised when it refused to install in the newly created partitions... I had a MBR install not a GPT install. If I didn't have my old hdd with my 7 install intact I would have had to find a clean PC to create a GPT install usb key. The reason why I prefer GPT installs is that you aren't limited to primary 3 partitions and 1 extended partition therefore booting multiple O/Ses is much easier to accomplish. Plus you can't just convert between MBR and GPT without risking data loss in the process.

After you upgrade once, you can do a clean install should you wish on the 256 gig install and windows 10 will activate automatically as the license is tied to a unique hardware identifier (tied to the motherboard) in the cloud.