I got my 60GB OCZ Vertex, but really have no time to reinstall Windows and set everything back up. How can I go about moving the entire partition?
The current HDD is a 320GB, with about 180GB of data on it. About 140GB is music and ISOs, so I will move them to another computer.
Help?
You can move the data off of the partition to the other computer via network or transfer cable, or using external.
Then shrink the partition to same size or smaller than the SSD.
Now clone Win7 HD to SSD, or copy partition using free Partition Wizard CD.
Cloning software is often available on your HD's Support Downloads webpage for this purpose.
Backup your data and music. Delete the data and music from the original drive. Then use cloning/imaging software like Norton Ghost to make an image of your Windows 7 drive and then restore it to your SSD. Make completely sure that once the data and music is removed that the total OS and miscellaneous data is less than the 60gig SSD drive. You cannot put something bigger on a smaller drive. I would try to get that down to 30gig so you have half the drive for the system restore points, new software etc. You need to have some slack space.
What about the 100MB System Reserve partition, should I also move that?
Most imaging software will ask you to select the partitions on the drive; so select the 100mb reserve as well as the C partition for the image.
Yes.
Each cloning software is slightly different in how they lable the options. Acronis asks which partition of that drive you want to back up or, do you want to Image the Entire disk as it is.
But what you want to look for is a "Image Entire Drive" option, rather than just partitions.
This will image everything, including the little 100MB partition as well as the OS partition and make things much easier.
FYI: You can recover the MBR into Win7 partition if you want by marking it Active, then running Startup Repair from the booted Win7 DVD repair console up to 3 separate times with reboots.
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