Solved Toshiba L330 Pro laptop duel boot XP/W7 HDD shadow copy to new SDD

[uexperience]

Edit: Thread should read Toshiba L300 Pro, not L330.

Hi, I am very pleased to be here as I have referenced this forum for years and the info has always been excellent, informed and well written.

My first thread as I can't seem to come up with any satisfactory google on the subject.

Am I going to have problems here:
My laptop has 3 partitions:C: XPx86 - 25G / E: W7x64 - 50G / D: Data - 75G
XP was installed first because it was the easy way to go, so the MBR is on that partition.

I have a shadow copy of XP and W7 (together) only, with no personal data on those partitions except their OSs and my software programs (all my Docs ect. from XP and W7 were always set to auto-direct to the Data partition).
The Data partition data (about 20G of files) has been backed up on both USB media storage and disks, to be replaced to the SSD later.

I'm putting in an Intel 570 120G SSD and I'm worried about possible problems, especially with the XP MBR and possible SSD drive alignment issues without fresh installs being done. I'm prepared to do that with W7, but I don't wont to go there with XP, especially as there is no updates any more. I do need the XP now and then to run software that I cannot replace and that will not run on W7.

Thank you for your interest and any help.

 

[uexperience]

Plenty of readers and probably many of them google hits, so not to leave them empty handed ...

This is the part of an article I really needed as XP has the MBR and where SSD alignment is critical. I ended up googling migrating XP to SSD and left out the bit about dual boot.

Partition Alignment:
Something important to consider with SSDs is partition alignment: in order to get the best performance, your Windows partition needs to be aligned so that it’s start sector lines up with the SSD page boundaries. Since it’s not possible to position a partition at sector 0, the easiest way to do this is to start the partition at sector 2048 (ie) leave a space of 1 MB. or 1024 kB, before the beginning of the partition. If you have any other partitions (say for data), they’ll need to be aligned to 1 MB boundaries as well. Primary partitions can be right next to each other, so long as the previous partition size is a multiple of 1024 kB. Logical partitions will need 1 MB of space before each partition to hold the logical partition table information.

Tips for migrating XP to an SSD

I hope that helps out other people looking for similar migrating to SSD problems

 

[gregrocker]

As long as your imaging software will copy the MBR, Track0 and Active flag same as on source drive then there should be no problem. If so get XP booting with Bootrec commands then if necessary add the Win7 drive using EasyBCD. Or you can Mark Win7 Partition Active then run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times to move the bootmgr to Win7 and start it, then Add XP using EasyBCD so that 7 boots the System.

Other tips here for SSD - Install and transfer the Operating System
SSD Alignment - Windows 7 Forums
SSD Tweaks and Optimizations in Windows 7

 

[uexperience]

Thanks for that gregrocker.

EasyBCD is a great program and I have used it a lot over the years.
I don't think I'll have any problems now and am aware of all you suggest and have XP and W7 pro. retail disks to do any of the above if needed. The alignment issue is what I was unsure about but I think I've got the picture.

Thanks for your input.

 

[gregrocker]

Let us know how it goes.

 

[uexperience]

All done.
Opened and cleaned out the laptop and replaced the battery while I was at it.

Zippity-do-da laptop now!