How to Clone a HP Z400 Workstation from a HDD to a SSD

From Matt Bilsky

The workstations in the lab are quite old and still use spinning disk drives (HDDs). While we wait for the newer computers to get setup at the end of the summer I want to install SSDs so the student researchers aren't bogged down by the slow performance of the computers especially during boots, logging in, and file loads.

The current boot time with the HDD is: 1:19 minutes

and with the new SSD and no RAID card: 32 seconds

Login time with HDD: 2:48 minutes

and with the SSD: 22 seconds

It was not a simple 1 to 1 clone because the existing system uses a RAID controller card. I needed to repair the master boot record (MBR) in Windows 10 using a repair disk.

This tutorial will discuss how to clone the drive using CloneZilla then repair it so that it boots from a SSD.

Recovery techniques to fix the winload.exe Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) in Windows 10 are discussed.

Lastly, a method to fix the access denied error when using the bootrec /fixboot command is introduced.

YouTube Tutorial Video

Software Links

CloneZilla tool (using TuxBoot to create the disk): Clonezilla

Windows 7 USB/DVD tool for creating bootable media from .iso file: Windows USB/DVD Download Tool

Hardware Links

Amazon affiliate links for the Samsung SSD I used in this video. Same price for you, a small kick-back for me if you purchase. Thanks for the support!

Samsung 860 EVO SSD (click picture for Amazon Link)

References

The following posts helped me figure this all out:

Tom'sHardware: HDD wont boot windows after cloning

Repair Master Boot Record (MBR) in Windows 10/8/7

How to Fix Access Is Denied Error in Windows 10