Changing Windows Boot Drive

[fidget]

I am considering changing my media PC's boot drive from a 2.5" laptop drive to an SSD. Does anyone have recommendations on how I can make a bootable backup drom my current drive to the SSD?

[Opus4]

I just went through this due to a drive failure on my laptop... to switch from booting from its hard drive to an SSD, I used Acronis's True Image to clone the boot drive to the new SSD -- created a boot CD, then used it to do the cloning. It reduced the size of the main partition to fit the new smaller SSD drive in the process.

Then, when Windows later decided somehow that it wanted to revert to booting from the hard drive instead of the mSATA SSD, I used EasyBCD to reconfigure which drive to boot from.

I'm sure there are other utilities, but those are the ones I used.

The laptop was originally configured to use the mSATA SSD as cache for the hard drive & reconfiguring everything to handle changing that is another story that probably doesn't apply here.

Andy

[KeithAbbott]

I just moved from a 30GB SSD to a 120GB SSD for my boot drive. I used a two-bay hard drive duplicator, probably took all of 5-10 minutes. Installed the new drive, and booted right up. Then I went into the Windows Disk Management utility, and increased the size of the partition from 30GB to 120GB. Done.

Also, if you are cloning a rotational hard drive to an SSD, make sure the TRIM functionality gets enabled, and also make sure that Windows isn't doing automatic defrags on the SSD (assuming you are using Windows).

[JustFred]

Some of the SSD manufacturers provide data migration s/w that will handle the job.

I've used Samsung's Data Migration tool (Windows) and the good 'ole DOS-bootable version of Norton Ghost (2003, aka v11, I believe). Both of these handle re-sizing the partitions from src -> dest. As long as both src & dest drives can be plugged into the system, no additional h/w is needed.

[KryptoNyte]

Is Samsung still just using a version of Acronis, or have they developed their own?

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Also, if you are cloning a rotational hard drive to an SSD, make sure the TRIM functionality gets enabled, and also make sure that Windows isn't doing automatic defrags on the SSD (assuming you are using Windows).

... and check to make sure the partition offset is okay. I believe a launch of the benchmarking software "AS-SSD" will show you if it's okay (in green text) without even running the benchmark.

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

Is Samsung still just using a version of Acronis, or have they developed their own?

WD provides a stripped-down version of Acronis.

It's been awhile, but I recall that the s/w Samsung provided in the box (with the 840 & 850 series SSDs) was their own.

Samsung's website also had a free version of Norton Ghost 15.01 for Windows. I've used that too, but it doesn't handle dis-similar disk sizes very well (and sometimes not at all).

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

... and check to make sure the partition offset is okay. I believe a launch of the benchmarking software "AS-SSD" will show you if it's okay (in green text) without even running the benchmark.

Thanks for the tip, I downloaded the software and checked; my partition offset was fine, but it turns out I was running my boot drive in IDE mode instead of AHCI mode. So I changed my bios setting, and voila! AS SSD is now happy with my system...

[KryptoNyte]

Glad the switch from IDE to AHCI went fine. Sometimes that doesn't go so smooth if the driver isn't ready for it.