Of course you can use other cloning and imaging (paid) software, such as Acronis. We will use the free version of Macrium Reflect to clone the stock HDD to the new empty SSD. Thus the laptop is equiped with a stock HDD Western Digital 500GB and a Samsung 830 SSD 128GB. We already placed a new empty SSD in a The Lenovo B590 HDD Caddy and inserted in the laptop. We used a Lenovo Essential B590 with a Core i3 3110M.
In this how-to we’ll explain how you can clone the Windows 8 and manufacturer recovery partitions to a new drive, like a SSD, and get your laptop in the same state with all your applications and files without much hassle. We can imagine you do not like to pay twice for the same product. However in most cases you already have fully paid for the Windows 8 license on your laptop. For instance if you want to upgrade your old, and perhaps sluggish, HDD in your laptop with a much faster SSD, how can you re-install Windows on the new SSD? One of the option is to purchase a full retail version of Windows 8. This makes it difficult to re-install Windows on any new purchased hard drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD). Nowadays Windows 8 laptops are often not supplied with a Windows restore or recovery DVD.
