MBP Mid 2012 - Dual SSD's -Windows 10 & Mac OS?

[odom117]

Need some helping making sure I can do this...

I currently have a mid-2012 MBP non retina. I've upgraded RAM to 8 GB, taken out my disk drive and replaced it with an SSD. I'm running Mac OS on the SSD.

My original drive was partitioned with windows 10 running on only 100 GB. Once I installed the SSD and switched to running Mac OS off of it, I expanded my Windows partition on the original hard drive to enable me to use all the space. Then, I figured I might as well just replace the original drive with another SSD that's solely dedicated to Windows. In the end, I'll have two separate hard drives inside my Mac, each one running its own OS, one for Windows 10 and the other for Mac.

My question then comes on advice for setting up the new SSD, in the original drive slot, for Windows 10. Should I basically copy the original drive to the new SSD? Or should I just start over with a fresh Windows 10 OS on the new SSD? I didn't want the fact that the original Windows 10 I had was a partition to mess anything up. I don't mind buying a new Windows 10 license.

Thanks in advance.

 

[andy9l]

There's various cloning tools for Windows - I'd at least try one of them before starting from scratch.

Steps that I'd take:

1. Buy a new SSD
2. Buy a SATA to USB adapter - something like this
3. Boot up into Windows on your Mac
4. Connect new SSD to Mac (booted in Windows) via USB (using the adapter from #2)
5. Pick a cloning software (Macrium Reflect is highly rated)
6. Clone C:\ (or your main boot drive) onto your new USB-connected SSD don't screw this up and accidentally format your Mac drive
7. Follow any extra steps in your cloning software to remove any unnecessary partitions on the newly cloned SSD
8. Turn your Mac off
9. Swap out old Windows HDD for your newly cloned SSD
10. Say a short prayer to a being of your choice, and try booting

You might need to re-license Windows as it may detect a hardware change. But it should still run for a while unlicensed so you can be sure it worked (I think!).

I'm not 100% on this, but that's the approach I would take. Obviously make a backup of important stuff from Windows before doing this!

 

[odom117]

My love for you is vast.

Thank you.