Changing from hard drive to SSD what do I do about my OS

Based on feedback attained here it seems as if I am going to buy a SSD to replace my current hard drive. My question now is, how do i transfer my OS and other stuff created on it to my new SSD. I assume I need to create an image of my current drive and do something along these lines:
[1]Create image of drive which now holds Win7 and sits on the C: drive.
[2] install new SSD drive
[3] Copy image from old HD to new SSD.
[4] Shut down PC.
It is here that things get fuzzy. Do I remove my old drive at this point and before the system boots up go to my BIOS and tell it where C: my boot drive now sits or......?
Oh and another thing. Will Microsoft now think I have a new PC or something? I mean would I need to re-register my win7 serial number or what-have-you?

pintree3 said:

I assume I need to create an image of my current drive and do something along these lines:
[1]Create image of drive which now holds Win7 and sits on the C: drive.
[2] install new SSD drive
[3] Copy image from old HD to new SSD.
[4] Shut down PC.
It is here that things get fuzzy. Do I remove my old drive at this point and before the system boots up go to my BIOS and tell it where C: my boot drive now sits or......?
Oh and another thing. Will Microsoft now think I have a new PC or something? I mean would I need to re-register my win7 serial number or what-have-you?

It's not likely you will have to re-register. A new hard drive isn't "a new PC".

Your first decision point is "do I do a clean install or do I try to transfer/restore my existing system".

The former is less likely to be problematic, but it's up to you to decide if you want to do the latter. The latter usually works, but occasionally requires troubleshooting and problems.

I'm assuming for the following comments that you don't want to do a clean install.

You must then decide if you want to use cloning or imaging. They are different. Your list above assumes imaging is to be used.

For imaging, your steps would generally be:

1: Choose an application to do it; Macrium Reflect Free Edition is a common choice.
2: Install Macrium and make an image file of your current C partition and also of your system reserved partition, if you have one. You probably do.
3: Save those image files on some other drive, most commonly an external.
4: make a "rescue disk" within Macrium, preferably using the "WinPE" method.
5: confirm that this disc will boot your PC and that you can locate your drives and partitions.
6: Disconnect the original hard drive. Connect the SSD.
7: Boot from the rescue disk and "restore" the previously saved image files to the SSD.
8: Confirm that the SSD is bootable.
9: Reconnect your old hard drive and do what you want with it. It will no longer be C.

The image files you make aren't "copied" anywhere. They need to be "restored" to make your new drive bootable.

A screen shot of Windows Disk Management would help.

I think this information -> Move to SSD: migrate your PC to solid state <- would be helpful for you to be guided on what are the things and steps you need to do the job.

Or maybe I did mean cloning since the SSD would be the new C:\ drive and therefore bootable. Anyhow, thank ye all As soon as I receive my new drive (Not yet purchased) I will read all that has been suggested here. Intel also seems to have instructions in doing something for it with its own instructions and I could provide the link but the forum rules here say, "3) No.... promoting products or other sites." I don't know if providing a link for a pdf file would be breaking the rules. If it doesn't then I will do so next time around.

Some new SSDs come with software designed to transfer your system from the old hard drive to the new. I've seen reports of them both succeeding and failing, but you certainly don't have to rely on them.

You should be prepared and able to do a clean install if all else fails.

Hi there

Use one of these cables so you can image your system BEFORE plugging in the new SSD -- simply "Clone" the HDD -- assuming th OS partition is not bigger than the capacity of the SSD -- it shouldn't be as you should ALWAYS keep the OS / pgms in its own partition -- put your data (music, films, documents etc in another partition / hdd).

Something like GPARTED will clone a partition or even boot up a Linux Live distro and just do the following command

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=64k conv=noerror,notrunc and go away for about 35 mins. dev/sda is the SOURCE disk and /dev/sdb is the target disk. check the actual device names on your system -- FDISK -L will show the devices.

There's loads of FREE live Linux distros around and most of them boot from a usb too. Linux Mint is probably the easiest - it will work straight out of the box.

This will also copy the MBR. Don't do this though on UEFI systems - that's a bit more complex.

Cheers
jimbo