Hard drive migration to SSD questions

tedus987

Posts: 207   +2
So, when I built my PC I installed the OS on a HDD drive with the thoughts that I could later transfer it to SSD,

(did it before using hard drive cloning software to copy the OS drive to a new drive and then once working formatting the old drive.)

however when I started doing some reserch on cloneing software I noticed that windows 7 might not be cloneable (my past experiances are with XP) since there are mixed reviews on each bit of software out there both on Amazon and on the web. sevral report that windows 7 sees the clone as an unlicenced copy and refuses to boot. others say the clone drive misses it's boot file.

can some people advise me on if any of these facts are true or not?
 
Hi.
Cloning should work fine if you do it properly with windows 7. It's possible that windows can throw up a licensing issue, but very unlikely. In the event that it does, call Microsoft and they should be able to get it sorted out for you.

As for the bootability of the drive, cloning the drive's data does not necessarily make it bootable, but if you look online you'll see some cloning tutorials that include a section for rewriting the MBR on your SSD to make it the primary bootable drive in case it ends up not booting properly. This isn't hard to do and usually isn't a necessary step.

Also just keep in mind that simply cloning the SSD will probably result in an unaligned drive, so make sure that you get it properly aligned. Some cloning software has an aligning option built into the cloning process that you'll want to select.

So go for it and come back if you're having any issues.
 
Any suggestions on what cloaning software, keep in mind since it's come to christmas (3 months away, starting to save now).

the reasion im asking is some cloneing software isn't windows 7 compatable and I was hoping to just pick it up from a store or amazon and run it, my old one was disk copy and clear but that isn't windows 7 comptable. (that one was a boot CD)
 
I have done a clone on a Win7 machine. At the time, as noted in this thread, the clone tools were missing Win7 support and ones that had Win7 support were a bit deficient wrt SSD best practices so I ended up using Acronis True Image then Paragon Alignment Tool.

True Image should support alignment properly now - the other issue I had with it was it proportionally expanded the partition and stuffed up the alignment in the first place because of a bug in the destination drive size options (I couldn't just choose to clone a 100GB drive to a 240GB SSD on a sector to sector clone because of this bug) so the original issue was artificially created.
 
Hay I've been reading the guide as HK said and I came up with a question, it says that if the primary partition of the OS is bigger than the SSd use EaseUS Parition Manager however...

it also says that if the OS partition is smaller than the SSD use Clonzilla

what if you want to clone a 1 TB HDD to a 1 TB SDD... a.k.a. equil size?
 
Either one will work.
The reason is easus allows you to selectively exclude some files, so if your primary partition is bigger than the ssd, you have to exclude some files to copy.
If they're the same size either is fine.
 
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