I have a strong desire to reduce the amount of 'stuff' I have. For example, I have a work laptop and a personal laptop, both Lenovo Thinkpads (T410 and T400). I have also bought a 512MB SSD (Crucial M4).
I would like to clone both hard drives as they are to two different partitions on the SSD and be able to multi-boot between them. Both are currently Windows 7, though one is Professional and the other Ultimate.
I will need to shrink one partition (work machine) but that's not a big deal; that machine has a 320GB HD of which I will use maybe 160GB max (it's at ~120 today). My personal machine has a 160GB HD in it, and has a data partition of about 150GB. I'll partition the rest as an extended partition for stuff I want to be able to access from either partition (whichever one I boot from).
I was thinking about using a boot loader like GRUB initially, but now I think it might be easier/better just to let Windows handle it (unless, of course, I decide to switch one of the partitions to Linux later). However, I'm hesitant because I've had issues with Windows updates on another machine I have (a Hackbook built on a Lenovo S10e with OSX, Windows XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu) using Chameleon as the bootloader (which may be the problem in itself).
Since my employer provides me with a laptop, I would just use it and sell my personal laptop; then move the drive to a newer machine when it got replaced (or just buy my own since we have a BYOD policy as well).
Thinking I'll use Gparted to partition the SSD with two primary partitions and one extended and resize the partition on the work drive (after backing it up first, of course) then using a Linux live CD and dd to clone the partitions to their new target partitions.
Questions arising:
1) Should I use a separate bootloader (e.g. GRUB) or just let one of the Windows partitions handle the multiboot, and just editing boot.ini to swith between partitions?
2) Any comments from the perspective of getting my Windows updates applied?
3) Is there a different method I should consider? Or is this a bad idea in general?
Thanks for feedback.
I would like to clone both hard drives as they are to two different partitions on the SSD and be able to multi-boot between them. Both are currently Windows 7, though one is Professional and the other Ultimate.
I will need to shrink one partition (work machine) but that's not a big deal; that machine has a 320GB HD of which I will use maybe 160GB max (it's at ~120 today). My personal machine has a 160GB HD in it, and has a data partition of about 150GB. I'll partition the rest as an extended partition for stuff I want to be able to access from either partition (whichever one I boot from).
I was thinking about using a boot loader like GRUB initially, but now I think it might be easier/better just to let Windows handle it (unless, of course, I decide to switch one of the partitions to Linux later). However, I'm hesitant because I've had issues with Windows updates on another machine I have (a Hackbook built on a Lenovo S10e with OSX, Windows XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu) using Chameleon as the bootloader (which may be the problem in itself).
Since my employer provides me with a laptop, I would just use it and sell my personal laptop; then move the drive to a newer machine when it got replaced (or just buy my own since we have a BYOD policy as well).
Thinking I'll use Gparted to partition the SSD with two primary partitions and one extended and resize the partition on the work drive (after backing it up first, of course) then using a Linux live CD and dd to clone the partitions to their new target partitions.
Questions arising:
1) Should I use a separate bootloader (e.g. GRUB) or just let one of the Windows partitions handle the multiboot, and just editing boot.ini to swith between partitions?
2) Any comments from the perspective of getting my Windows updates applied?
3) Is there a different method I should consider? Or is this a bad idea in general?
Thanks for feedback.
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