how hard is it to "Move" install to another hdd?

g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs

is this legit?

i dont see any options to select a partition anywhere, i initialized it in disk management and same screens. no options to clone one partition. when trying auto mode it says my new disk is too small. i dont think there is a way to clone only one partition

wolfgang is coming to read this thread? if so ill wait for his recomendation.

thanks for the help so far greg.

Greg has asked me to help. I will try to the best of my knowledge. The first thing you have to do with the SSD is to align it and to create a primary, active partition. Details are here: SSD Alignment My proposed alignment is 64, but you can also use 1024 which some people think is better.

On your Disk Management snip I did not see a 100MB active boot partition. That simplifies things. After you put the image into the defined active partition, the SSD should boot (after you changed the BIOS boot sequence).

Try that and post back if you run into problems. I would physically disconnect the other disks (except the one where the image is) during the imaging operation and when everything works you need to deactivate your "old" C:

how do i put the image into the ssd? that is the problem i am having...

DirtyElf said:

how do i put the image into the ssd? that is the problem i am having...

That is the easy part. I thought you were using Acronis - but if not, we can use Macrium with which I am more familiar.

It is actually very simple.

1. you make a restore disk (same approach for Acronis or Macrium)
2. You image your system to an external disk - if you do not have an external disk, you can even image to a partition on an internal disk. This partition must NOT be C and it must be large enough to fit the image.
3. You change the BIOS boot order to boot from the restore CD that you created under #1 and pull the image to your newly created partition on the SSD.

Here are a couple of tutorials I made for Macrium - if you want to use that. The first one is a quick tutorial i made for Vista (but it is exactly the same for Win7). The second one is a more detailed Video. Pay attention to the part in the recovery section where it says "Active" and "Restore MBR" - you need both of those.

Image your system with free Macrium - Vista Forums

Imaging with free Macrium

PS: Looked at your Disk Management again. Your compressed image size will be about 25GBs or a bit less. You have 40GB of used space on C. Btw: How big is your SSD?

oh. ok, im going to do it the imaging way.

i already have acronis, i assume it is the same. ill read through the tuts and try it with acronis.

Choose Acronis "Backup my System" to choose your Win7 partition, then save it to external or data partition on HD if it will let you. Then click on Recovery to reimage to SSD, or create a Boot Disk to boot to reimage.