Installing SSD (from another laptop) into Laptop Caddy for dual boot?

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l0aded

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Oct 29, 2015
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I have an interesting perdicament where warranty will not let me swap out the existing HDD in my Lenovo W540 so I have to install a SSD in the laptop optical drive using a caddy. If I take a SSD with Windows already installed on a Lenovo W530 (different processor, different GPU) and put it in the optical drive space will it be able to boot without any hiccups?

An alternative I was thinking of is to simply clone my existing HDD (only using 100gb of space) into the 250gb SSD and attempt the dual boot that way, will this work?

I cannot reformat a fresh copy of Windows unfortunately.

Thanks.
 
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Hi l0aded,

1) Does your laptop have an eSATA port? If it does you can put your SSD into an external drive enclosure that supports e-SATA and boot from there. Window's can't boot from a USB device, but it can from eSATA.

2) If you plugged in your SSD via caddy you need to make sure it was the first drive in your BIOS boot order. After that it would be recommended to run a clean install of windows, or clone the current HDD to the newly installed SSD to make sure all your drivers are correct.

If you go with option 2 the steps would look like:

-Pyisically install SSD from latptop2 into laptop1 via caddy
-Boot into laptop1 HDD and install cloning software
-Clone laptop1 HDD onto new SDD
-Restart laptop1 and go into BIOS to ensure the SSD...
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glamdringfh

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Dec 23, 2013
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Hi l0aded,

1) Does your laptop have an eSATA port? If it does you can put your SSD into an external drive enclosure that supports e-SATA and boot from there. Window's can't boot from a USB device, but it can from eSATA.

2) If you plugged in your SSD via caddy you need to make sure it was the first drive in your BIOS boot order. After that it would be recommended to run a clean install of windows, or clone the current HDD to the newly installed SSD to make sure all your drivers are correct.

If you go with option 2 the steps would look like:

-Pyisically install SSD from latptop2 into laptop1 via caddy
-Boot into laptop1 HDD and install cloning software
-Clone laptop1 HDD onto new SDD
-Restart laptop1 and go into BIOS to ensure the SSD is first in the boot order
-Boot into SSD and see if the clone was successful

Here is a Drive Cloning Tutorial, the steps I've written above will be what you want to use, but at the bottom of the tutorial you can find a link to the Macrium Reflect cloning software and it's step-by-step walkthrough.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/faq/id-2839729/clone-drive.html
 
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