Need help Migrating/Cloning my HDD to an SSD

[kywildcat4life]

I just recently bought a dell inspiron 15R 7520 special edition laptop. It runs windows 8 and has a western digital 750G hard drive. I bought a kingston 120G SSD at my local staples last weekend. The Kingston kit has an enclosure to put the SSD in and attach to my laptop via USB for cloning. The kit came with cloning software which is acronis true image. I have tried about everything possible to no avail .... I called Dell support and after being on the phone with them for an hour they told me that my computer was not compatible with an SSD? that doesn't seem accurate? I went to Crucial's website and allowed their scanning software to detect my system and it says that my memory is SATA 3 6gbs? I called Kingston and troubleshoot with them and the insist that my computer is compatible with the SSD... they encouraged me to clone using a free software called macrium true image....however, one of the representative told me that I only needed to clone my C drive? the software indicated that my hard drive contained 6 different partitions and I only cloned the C partition and sure enough my computer would not boot to the SSD with it installed inside my laptop. I have only used 40GB of my 750 storage so I know the 120G SSD should be sufficient.. can anyone out there help me with this? or was the dell technician correct when he told me my system is incompatible with an SSD? any help would be greatly appreciated? Thanks and hope to hear from someone.. James

 

[lonewolf7]

Don't you have the DVD of WIN 8 ? If not talk to Dell or retailer to provide the OS's DVD, you have paid for it. If you have the DVD then install the OS from it to SSD.

Its better to install an OS and not to transfer it, cloning is kind of transferring, and you could get into trouble.

 

[kywildcat4life]

Don't you have the DVD of WIN 8 ? If not talk to Dell or retailer to provide the OS's DVD, you have paid for it. If you have the DVD then install the OS from it to SSD.

Its better to install an OS and not to transfer it, cloning is kind of transferring, and you could get into trouble.

Hey Lonewolf thanks much for the info and reply! my system wasn't shipped with the original windows 8 os reinstallation disk but I do have the utilities and drivers CD....doing a clean install is going to be the best and only way to go for me. I was reading on another recent thread that others with the same computer as mine were all having the same problems ... seems as though Dell has done something that makes using our recovery media almost impossible to install on an SSD... I had tried using my recovery media but I kept getting an error message saying that I needed a hard drive of 698 GB or larger....its as though Dell did something and whenever you try to install their recovery media on an SSD drive that is smaller than the original HDD ( even though the recovery media is smaller than the SSD) it will not......so I guess I will have to download and burn my own windows 8 CD from microsoft or request it from Dell and go from there...thanks again, James

 

[lonewolf7]

Yeah recovery media will not help to install WIN 8 on SSD, you need a bootable media like I said on the first post. And yes talk to Dell to provide you the original media. Downloading WIN 8 from Microsoft will help also.