Hi, I am about to build my first computer (hopefully nothing goes wrong ), but I have one aspect to decide upon.... Whether to go SSD now or not. This is not in the hardware forum though as I want to know whether it is possible to move the OS (Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit) to a new storage device? If it is I will just install onto a HDD and then buy a SSD when prices come down. Thanks for any advice
Yeah its possible - there are several free tools you can use for disk imaging. There's plenty of threads about different software that can do it here within this forum, as several people have been doing the same thing lately
Thanks, did a search but didn't see anything, will look again. Most importantly though, this would change the boot drive to the new one (and would it delete old W7 files)?
No and no. However, both of those things are extremely simple to do. What you would do is get the image onto the SSD, go into the BIOS and change the boot drive, boot into the OS on the SSD and reformat the old drive using the command prompt. Get into the command prompt without using a mouse, for that extra sense of nerdiness. (windows key + R, type in CMD, hit return, type in format d: /q )
This will sound like a stupid question, so sorry in advance. Why can you not simply copy or move the Windows 7 files from the HDD to the SSD, then switch the SSD to be the boot and format the HDD? Is it simply because errors are likley to occur and so mess up the OS? Ta v much
moving the files isnt everything that is needed for an OS to function. it wont boot at all since it wont have copied over the boot sector which in windows 7 is controlled by the 100mb reserve partition at the start of the drive. best way is to image drive - burn image to SSD then format old drive JOB DONE
Thanks a lot, that should do it nicely (just have to keep random junk on my HDD below 128GB or so so its not too big for the SSD )
