Backup windows and restore to smaller SSD? Which software does it?

xMike720

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Oct 29, 2015
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Hi there,

I bought a few new drives because my old SSD is acting weird after a few weeks of usage (suddenly gets registry problems or something). Sometimes when I did CPU intensive stuff like converting, rendering, encoding my pc became VERY slow in the current session and mostly it was unable to boot the next day and I had to reinstall windows (happend like after 1 month after windows install & around 6-7 times). My last Blue screen message was a "Bad System Config". It's a Samsung 840 Evo 256gb.

Anyhow, I bought a new 1tb HDD and another 240gb SSD from SanDisk this time. I already got the HDD yesterday and installed windows and wanted to install everything, like programms, drivers and such and then back it up and restore it to my new SSD. I had DriveImage XML in mind, but I found out that its not possible to restore the backup to a smaller drive. Do you know any programms that will backup my entire system so I can restore it on the smaller SSD?
 
Hey there, xMike720.

Basically you might be able clone/migrate just the OS and system partitions with specific software, but they have to be smaller than the overall size of the destination drive. Here's a pretty nice tutorial on how to migrate your OS from an HDD to an SSD: http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-migrate-to-a-solid-state-drive-without-reinstalling-windows. It might prove useful.
As for the issues you were having, make sure that you have all your OS updates along with all the drivers installed and that all the components are compatible. I think your old SSD has a firmware update and if it was the cause for the problems, then updating its firmware might have resolved the issue.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD