Running Win 10 Pro 1703 edition, Paragon SSD Migration 5.0. I have a 1 TB HDD partitioned into C: (427 GB), E: (about 400 GB) and a couple of small partitions--Recovery (put in by Win10?), and Q: (courtesy of MS Office 2010?). On the C: partition I have:
  • Users: 287 GB
  • Program Files (x86) 46.2 GB
  • Program Data 43.6 GB
  • Windows 24.7 GB
  • Program Files 4.5 GB
  • a few zero-size that I can't delete: found.000, Windows.old(1), and Windows.old(2)
  • a few quite small folders, including Windows.old and a bunch of weird-named folders presumably created by Windows Update

I want to migrate to a Samsung EVO850 250GB. My thought was that I would put the Windows, both Program Files, and the Program Data folders, plus the bunch of various small weird ones I don't know are drive-sensitive or not (e.g., BM2003, Windows.old, &c) on the new SSD C: drive, and leave Users (mostly my various documents, photos, projects, and such) on the current hard drive, which will presumably become D:

As expected, Paragon SSD Migration finds too much used space on current HDD C:, and offers me the opportunity to exclude folders. (I thought that the instructions were a little confusingly worded: to choose folders to exclude, un-select them in the list). Fine, I choose Users and get the program to calculate the new space situation. Whirr, whirr, and "The wizard has failed to calculate excludes size" and "Operation failed / Failed to get error description. Error code is 2684354849," neither of which IMHO is very useful in a consumer product. Some documentation suggests that the \Users folder must be on C:, or must be included in the migration, which brings me back to the original space problem. I imagine that this "failed to calculate" problem arises from trying to exclude the Users folder, but that's just conjecture.

I can imagine some workarounds, like saving the contents of the User account folders on my external hard drive, stripping them out of my C:\Users folder, then setting up some sort of "alternate C:\Users" on my old hard drive (giving me two separate sets of \User\Howard\AppDate folders and the like). Or, I can exclude Downlaoads, Documents, Pictures, Videos, and Music, Contacts, etc. folders for each of my several users, and after the migration point to them one by one (Presumably excluding will retain the folder structure X:\Users\Howard\Documents etc?), but this doesn't address AppData, or the various folders that various programs have created under C:\Users\Howard that are not these--but do they have to be on C: anyway, I guess? But actually this is the sort of thing that I had hoped that a SSD migration program would do for me, in some sort of creative or graceful way.

So: what's the problem with the calculation--is it the \Users folder or something else? Does \Users have to be on the new SSD C: drive? What do I do next? How do I handle the problem of having my documents and such on a folder not under \Users?

Looking at other messages on this forum, I see that there are a few others with a similar "failed to calculate" problem. Any advice gratefully received. Many thanks. -Howard