Ok so I took the plunge and bought an SSD tonight. I made a serious cock up with my HDD and after a system restart. BootMGR was missing. I couldnt repair so had to reinstall windows. Loosing everything from my HDD. Though to me this isn't that bad all I lost was music (which is also backed up) and all my games. Which I now have to redownload or install from disk. So I bought an SSD. Those interested I bought Corsair Force Series 3 V2 120GB 2.5" SATA-III Solid State Hard Drive which was £128.98 inc VAT from Aria and free delivery. I found this guide http://www.ssdfreaks.com/content/664/how-to-clone-hdd-to-ssd-with-windows-7s-own-software Which is how I am going to install windows onto tjhe SSD. As for the life of me cannot wait to redownload my games. Though I am not going to download all of them right now. Thought I'd share the guide xD
In the same situation i used this --> http://www.seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf It's one of the Acronis tools rebranded, free download. Managed to talk my old man through it over the phone, it's really that easy.
No worries, I am going to be using it next week when my SSD arrives. Current C drive usage is 50gb. Thats with BF3 and Skyrim installed lol Going to be easy to clone to SSD!
If you need to quickly install some programs when you've installed windows (such as vlc, skype, chrome, malwarebytes, adobe reader etc), I use a batch installer called http://ninite.com/. No adware or anything and it quickly installs the latest versions so I dont have to go to the individual websites, just thought it may help.
This one will only work if you have a seagate / maxtor hardrive connected to the system. I use Acronis True image myself, Best bit of software I ever bought
I always use gparted. Use it to do a partition to partition copy. I like it because I know it will be aligned to mib properly. Most cloning tools still are not meant to be used for ssd and will align to cylinder which does not work for ssd. You end up with the file system starting part way through one of the 4K blocks instead of the beginning. This results in write amplification and degrades performance quite a lot. Alignment is very important for ssd performance.
So G Partition is good for creating the clone partition of windows, and use windows itself to install the clone? Or can you suggest something else?
You just copy the partition of hdd to partition of ssd. You can shrink the hdd partition in gparted first and make your partition on the ssd here too all in one place. Initiate the copy and that is all. Then you are done with gparted. Everything for the cloning is done in gparted (in linux), nothing is done for this with windows at all. Often the clone won't boot, so then you need to boot off the windows install disk, enter recovery console and use bcdedit /fixboot . You may also need to go through the /fixmbr and or /rebuildbcd commands in bcdedit too depending.
It's done in Linux so I need to brun Gparted to a disk and not use it via deamon tools. I will burn it to a disk later. I'm going to do the clone etc when I have the SSD!
Right, make live gparted linux usb/cd and boot it, you need to have both disk (source and target) as it makes an in place copy, no making images. There are less steps and it is faster.
So I burnt the iso to a cd, I boot into it instead of windows etc and then use it to create the partition and also format/partition the SSD and copy the image?
Yes, you boot the gparted, shrink the hdd partition if needed, create ssd partition, and copy it disk to disk. There is no imaging involved at all. It just copies the raw data from one to the other. No formatting will be done on the ssd, it needs to be unallocated partition to place the data copy. See the manual if I am not being clear.
Ok cool, saves me lots of time and effort xD I would do a fresh install but three hours to download BF3 isn't something I want to do again anytime soon.
