How to clone a Windows 7 HDD to a new SSD
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 04:48PM Tweet
Photo by: AndiH
I recently acquired myself a new laptop for work. I chose the Lenovo X201, seeking optimal portability as I am constantly running from meeting to meeting.
I have a desktop PC at work but I saw the benefits of only having one machine and one windows desktop, so I ordered a dockingstation for the Lenovo and planned to migrate completely to the laptop. But I also wanted to improve the X201 and add a SSD drive, since it was originally delivered with HDD. So I planned to clone the internal HDD drive, with my company’s Windows 7 image and all my custom programs on it, to a new SSD drive utilizing a HDD bay adaptor in the docking (where the DVD-ROM would normally go). Then I would swap the two drives and use the cloned SSD drive in my laptop and the HDD as additional storage via the docking.
I goggled a bit trying to find out what to use for the cloning, but ended up with quite a lot of confusing options. I tried several programs that promised drive-to-drive cloning, but there where a lot of considerations.
First off the SDD drive of 128 GB was smaller (119 GB formatted) than my C: partition on the HDD, then the first few attempts failed during the prosess or the seemingly final results was not bootable.
But here is a list of what I ended up doing - that worked.
Steps that took about 30 minutes from start to finish – once I figured it out:
1. I defragmented my drive using PerfectDisk 11 (a trial version is found here.)
2. I had to shrink my 320 GB C: partition to be smaller than the SSD. So I used Partition Wizard - free edition available for personal use here. Using the rulers I could slide the C: partition to become 118GB. Thats 1 GB less than my SSD, about 100-200MB differense is enough though.
3. I used DriveImage XML (download here) to do a Drive-to-Drive clone running it from Windows 7 desktop. Works like a charm when the target drive partition is bigger than the source.
4. I Swapped the HDD and SSD driv physically, and booted. (do not hook up your old drive yet)- But the boot did not work, its missing boot sector files.
5. Then I rebooted with a Windows 7 install USB drive (or use your original DVD)
6. When I got to the install screen I choose repair – Then it asks to fix boot files on the drive where the windows installation is found.
7. Remove the Windows 7 USB or DVD and reboot the PC – it now boots directly to your working cloned Windows 7 installation.
This was how I ended up doing it. It was based on me finding DriveImage XML that claimed to have a working Drive-to-drive option, and I wanted to use that. Later I found this guide, which looks similar, but creates a full drive image using the built inn Backup and Recovery software in Windows 7 to create an image and then extract that using the Windows 7 DVD or USB.
So the steps would then be:
1. Defragment harddrive
2. Shrink partition as necessary
3. Go to Control Panel, press Backup and Restore
4. Select “Create system image” – This requires a second drive or disk partition you could put the image on (could also be USB Drive or disk)
5. Reboot with Windows 7 installation DVD or USB
6. Press repair – and select “repair from system image” on the next screen. Choose source image file and destination drive - your SSD drive.
Even though I tried a few cloning tools with no luck, and there probably is a way to do this without the reboot and repair – these steps work and it does not take long. Please leave tips on how you would do it, either in Windows or through bootable USB drives with cloning software, which I did not test this time.
Good luck.
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