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Clone Win7 64-bit

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clonezilla works well and you run it from a bootable disc. The partition were windows in installed must be smaller than SSD. Or else you are going to have a problem. So try to make it smaller by removing all your videos/music/data to an external drive before you start to clone. Update the firmware on the ssd to make sure trim is enable. Or else you are going to be disappointed with the ssd speed. Is the old drive IDE or SATA? If its sata then just clone and restore..But if its IDE I would recommend to sysprep the system first. As it might not want to boot once you restore the image.

Mu33rto said:
clonezilla works well and you run it from a bootable disc. The partition were windows in installed must be smaller than SSD. Or else you are going to have a problem. So try to make it smaller by removing all your videos/music/data to an external drive before you start to clone. Update the firmware on the ssd to make sure trim is enable. Or else you are going to be disappointed with the ssd speed. Is the old drive IDE or SATA? If its sata then just clone and restore..But if its IDE I would recommend to sysprep the system first. As it might not want to boot once you restore the image.


500GB WD Green SATA

320GB WD 7200RPM SATA

my Windows 7 64-bit install by itself is about 19GB

looking to buy a 64GB SSD
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Storage Expert

There are a number of ways that the OS should be optimized for an SSD that will not be set if you clone an HDD to the SSD.

The most important is that, for most motherboards, your disk controllers are set to IDE compatibility mode by default. Unless you changed it, the OS was installed with the controllers in IDE mode. SSDs should be run in AHCI mode to take advantage of features such as TRIM.

However, if you just change the controller mode (even without cloning), win7 will not boot. In Win7, there is actually a simple tweak to do. You edit the registry ( http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-... ), shut down, change the controller mode, and boot in AHCI mode. I suggest that, at a minimum, you do this.

Keeping the old drive as a storage drive is simple. Just keep it attached to the system and don't boot it. If you want to make it unbootable, you can use a disk utility to remove the "active" marking. Once you are 110% positive everything works fine on the new drive, you could delete the /windows and /program_files trees. Of course, you DO have an external backup of the drive anyway, right?

-------------------

Unasked-for advice:

The commonly preferred methods of moving to an SSD, in decreasing order of preference, are

1) Complete reinstall. Yes, it's a lot of work, and you don't want to do it. I can respect that; you have different priorities. But a fresh install gets rid of years of accumulated system crud, and builds a nice healthy boot and recovery environment.

2) Back up to an external drive with one of the many fine, free utilities that can restore to different hardware. EASEUS ToDo backup does this. The paid utility Acronis TrueImage does this, too. The recovery process will make adjustments for there being an SSD. Acronis even has an "optimize for SSD" check box.

3) The procedure I described above, followed by driver updates and the application of SSD tweaks from one of the many fine articles on the subject, like http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-... .

4) A straight clone and replace. By not going to AHCI, you lose some functionality, and disk performance will degrade over time.

WyomingKnott said:
There are a number of ways that the OS should be optimized for an SSD that will not be set if you clone an HDD to the SSD.

The most important is that, for most motherboards, your disk controllers are set to IDE compatibility mode by default. Unless you changed it, the OS was installed with the controllers in IDE mode. SSDs should be run in AHCI mode to take advantage of features such as TRIM.

However, if you just change the controller mode (even without cloning), win7 will not boot. In Win7, there is actually a simple tweak to do. You edit the registry ( http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-... ), shut down, change the controller mode, and boot in AHCI mode. I suggest that, at a minimum, you do this.

Keeping the old drive as a storage drive is simple. Just keep it attached to the system and don't boot it. If you want to make it unbootable, you can use a disk utility to remove the "active" marking. Once you are 110% positive everything works fine on the new drive, you could delete the /windows and /program_files trees. Of course, you DO have an external backup of the drive anyway, right?

-------------------

Unasked-for advice:

The commonly preferred methods of moving to an SSD, in decreasing order of preference, are

1) Complete reinstall. Yes, it's a lot of work, and you don't want to do it. I can respect that; you have different priorities. But a fresh install gets rid of years of accumulated system crud, and builds a nice healthy boot and recovery environment.

2) Back up to an external drive with one of the many fine, free utilities that can restore to different hardware. EASEUS ToDo backup does this. The paid utility Acronis TrueImage does this, too. The recovery process will make adjustments for there being an SSD. Acronis even has an "optimize for SSD" check box.

3) The procedure I described above, followed by driver updates and the application of SSD tweaks from one of the many fine articles on the subject, like http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-... .

4) A straight clone and replace. By not going to AHCI, you lose some functionality, and disk performance will degrade over time.



I have AMD AHCI enabled on my el-cheapo 785G mobo.
yes,i have a 1TB external drive
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