Ignoring the issues I had because of settings that I was trying to change that were
already set up correctly…
What I did to migrate from a 104mb partition (as much as I could shrink it) on a
500gb HDD to my new 120gb SSD (114gb net) was to do a partition clone of my
OS partition to an external drive then mount that partition clone back to the new SSD.
(I could probably have saved time by doing a direct partition-to-
partition clone)
This did not produce something “bootable”, I did not get the expected notice that
“windows failed to start” and an invitation to run startup repair, what I got was a
“No Operating system found” however I knew how to fix that… Doing a windows
Start-up repair from the installation disc rarely fails.
Before trying to boot from the SSD I “peeked” at the drive to see that what appeared
to be a complete Windows7 installation, folders & Files appeared to be there…
(rather than one large image file)
My computer is always set for DVD drive as first in boot order, So
I fed the DVD drive my Win7Pro-64 installation disc and booted the computer from
the DVD disc and progressed forward to the page where you get to choose between
“install Windows” or “REPAIR Windows”, I chose “Repair”
Five minutes later I was looking at my windows7 Pro x64 desktop running on the SSD.
at that point the only things left to do was to:
1)allow the system to load device drivers for the new SSD as system drive.
2)allow it to reboot when prompted to finish loading drivers.
3)after restarting to go back into disc management and “expand”
the C: partition to fill the available space (114.7GB) on the drive
4)to set up another cloning operation, a complete disc-to-disc clone of my SSD
as-installed to a spare 120gb HDD (this is fully bootable as my System drive)
5)To clone AGAIN as a system image (saved on my 2tb external drive as an additional backup)
6)To format and repurpose the 500gb WD black drive as a Data drive
and finally
- sit back and enjoy just how fast the SSD is.
THE issue people run into is cloning from a hard drive to a smaller SSD
is that Direct cloning to a smaller device is not possible
(the cloning software usually refuses to play nice)
Direct system images still refuse to mount to a hard drive smaller than the original,
because the “image” knows how big the original device was and will refuse to be
mounted to a smaller device.
Cloning from a “partition to partition” “Breaks” the bootldr, but bootldr can be fixed
via startup repair launched from an installation disc.
if you don’t have the proper installation disc you can download a “clean” ISO here:
http://www.w7forums.com/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-image-downloads-t12325.html
I never had any success cloning any OS more advanced than XP with the older versions
of Norton Ghost, but way back then I didn’t know about running Startup Repair from a
Vista or Windows7 installation disc.
I’m going to play around with that when I have some free time, because Ghost had
one interesting “feature”, it IGNORED the device sizes during a cloning operation,
what was important to Ghost was not the size of the drive but the size of the allocated
space on the source drive…
I don’t think I need to explain the repercussions of that to
anyone who can actually make use of that information…