Transferring W7 to a Solid State Device

[streetwolf]

Here's the deal. I just bought a 64GB SSD. Here it is for those interested:

Newegg.com - OCZ Agility EX Series OCZSSD2-1AGTEX60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II SLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Solid State Disks

Yes I know, way to much $$$$ but what the heck I'll use it as my boot/system drive.

So here's the thing. My current C: partition is about 350GB of which only about 15GB is actually used. The SSD is only about 60GB.

I use ShadowProtect Desktop as my disk image software and was planning to use that. The only thing is I don't know if it will let me restore from a larger to smaller drive even though in reality I'm using way less than 60GB.

So basically what's a good way to copy W7 over to the SSD in my case? Remember it will need to be bootable and all that.

 

[Murdear]

I guess it's better you do a Clean Install, since during the formatting, Windows 7 will align some files to optimize your SSD drive.

 

[icyitscold]

I have had this problem! Went from 160GB HDD to 120GB SSD. Unfortunaltely I dont think there is any way of creating an image from a large partition to a smaller one. They way I worked around this issue was installing 7 onto an 80GB partition and imaging that over!

Sorry to be the bringer of bad news but I think you may have to do a clean install onto your ssd! Im not 100% sure though so if you can find a way of shrinking your current partition down 60GB than brilliant! Good luck

 

[icyitscold]

By the way the SSD is well worth the money, you will notice the speed difference especially on boot! Just remember to go ont the ocz forum and complete all of the tweaks to speed you up and make sure you disable defrag, 7 is supposed to do this automatically with ssd but I would do it anyway just to make sure

 

[streetwolf]

I recall that Norton Ghost let me do this. It must have repartitioned the receiving drive. Hmmmm I suppose I could repartition my C: drive to say 20Gb or so.

 

[icyitscold]

That should work if you can do it! I wasn't able to because I was using an open source app which was very limited and im not very technical! Good luck

 

[streetwolf]

FYI... I used the Shrink command to make my c: partition smaller. The funny thing is that Shrink won't go any smaller then where the outermost unmovable file is.

In my case it was the MFT. I had to move my Page file and disable System Restore also. I also had to use Perfectdisk about 3 times in offline mode followed by another Shrink to gradually move the MFT closer to the beginning of the volume.

So now I have a C: partition of 48GB which should restore nicely to my 60GB SSD.

 

[streetwolf]

Got it, installed it, but had some problems booting it after I transferred Seven over to it. I finally got it running.

I thought my SATA II hard drive was fast but this SSD smokes. My boot time was always fast so even though it is faster my main excitement is that everything is faster.

Looking forward to a drop in prices with an increase in GigaBytes in the near future.