Once the drive has been initialized, you should see the drive show up in the bottom pane of Disk Management as unallocated space. See our guide to troubleshooting a hard drive that won't show up for more.
If you aren't prompted to initialize the drive, and don't see it in Disk Management, double-check that it's properly connected to your computer, and that the enclosure or dock is powered on (if necessary). If you aren't sure, look up your specific model of PC or motherboard to see which type of firmware it uses. If you have an older PC with a traditional BIOS, you may need to use an MBR partition table. I'll be using GPT for my SSD, since I have a modern PC with a UEFI firmware. It will prompt you to initialize the drive using either the GPT or MBR partition table. Click the Create and format hard disk partitions option, and Disk Management will open. Open the Start menu and type "partitions" in the search box. If it's a brand-new drive, you probably won't see the drive pop up in File Explorer, but don't worry it just needs to be initialized first.
Plug your SSD into the SATA-to-USB adapter, then plug that into your computer. Once you've gathered your necessities, it's time to get started. It's available to anyone, no matter what brand drive you have, so if your drive manufacturer doesn't offer a migration tool, Macrium Reflect is your next best bet. Just download the installer for the free home version and run through the wizard to get it up and running on your PC. Western Digital and SanDisk users can use WD's version of Acronis True Image (Opens in a new window) to copy their data using these instructions (Opens in a new window).įor this guide, we'll be using Macrium Reflect (Opens in a new window)-it's a free drive-cloning tool that works with any brand of hard drive and SSD. For example, if you bought a Samsung SSD, we recommend downloading Samsung Data Migration (Opens in a new window) and following the instructions in the user guide. If your drive manufacturer offers a migration program, that might be your best bet. There are many different drive-cloning tools on the market, and unfortunately there's no free, one-size-fits-all option.
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