Upgrading an HP 22-c0063w all in one PC. HDD to SSD cloning.

[EB59]

I bought an HP 22-c0063w all in one PC, refurbished a few days ago.   It has Windows 10 installed with HP's software.  I want to upgrade the slow SATA HDD and install a SATA SSD drive.  I don't need details on doing that as I know how to do that part.

What I need help with is, cloning the HDD to the SSD drive.  I've been using a USB cable to the SSD drive and running Aconis True Image for Crucial  (it's who made the SSD I'm using).  It keeps failing to clone!  My guess is the HP recovery partition is causing this.

The HP HDD is a 1 TB drive, I'm wanting to install a 500 GB SSD drive.  There is plenty of room as I only have Norton and Firefox installed.

I want to clone this SSD drive, then delete the recovery partitions on the new drive.  I'll keep the HDD intact in case I need to swap it back in if something goes wrong.

I have but a week to get this down, as it's being used for my vacation PC.

Thank you!

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Update:

I've installed a new 1TB SSD (Adata SU800).  System works fine so far.  No boot issues, I did check BIOS first.

I also installed 2, 4gig ram sticks for a combined 8gigs.  Original was only 4.

This sped up the system dramatically as I expected.  This will be the first PC I've ever bought as I've built all my own since the 286's came out.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@EB59 

First off, as "cloning" means (by defiition) making an EXACT copy -- you clearly can NOT clone a 1TB drive to a 500GB drive no matter how little is used on the original drive,. What SHOULD work, even with Acronis (which I stopped using some years back due to its unreliability), is shrinking down the OS partition on the HDD so that ALL the partitions will then fit easily onto the SDD.

If Acronis will not work even then, my suggestion is to try the alternative that many folks use -- Macrium Reflect.  I have used this several times to "clone" HDD contents to SDDs and have never run into any problems with it.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
2) Connect the new drive to the PC
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk

4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.

You should boot from the new drive without any problems.

[EB59]

Getting a 1 TB SSD today and will try again.  Thanks.