Question about cloning hard drives

[PemLam]

I would like to swap out the hard drive on my PC (1TB 7200 RPM IDE) to a 500 GB SSD. The existing (old) hard drive only has about 100GB of space taken up including the OS so I'm fairly certain it can be done even though I'm going from a larger hard drive to a smaller one. Am I correct or is it not going to work? I'm using a stand alone duplicator that copies sector by sector so it will be an exact copy of the original.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Asteroid-Man]

I would like to swap out the hard drive on my PC (1TB 7200 RPM IDE) to a 500 GB SSD. The existing (old) hard drive only has about 100GB of space taken up including the OS so I'm fairly certain it can be done even though I'm going from a larger hard drive to a smaller one. Am I correct or is it not going to work? I'm using a stand alone duplicator that copies sector by sector so it will be an exact copy of the original.

Thanks in advance.

In order to do a complete "clone" through Windows, it depends on the actual size of the partition. If the partition size is too large, you can't fit it on to the other drive. Now that said, you could always just copy the files manually once you make an NTFS partition on the new drive.

Some SSDs actually come with software to do exactly what you're looking for (which is what I did).

I purchased a Kingston HyperX SSD and it came with a cd containing Acronis True Image HD. For the most part it'll only clone the partition and windows files. Here's a walkthrough:
[YT]3e1ZzvTOuxI[/YT]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e1ZzvTOuxI


Just a heads up, if the Windows software on your computer came pre-installed, it's possible that it won't support an SSD as the bootdisk. This is the problem I ran into.

I had to go into the Motherboard BIOS and switch the settings around in the to accept an SSD (I was stuck in boot loop otherwise)
Then I had to use a fresh version of Windows on the new harddrive as opposed to the HP version.

I'm never buying a computer with Windows pre-installed on it again - such a hassle whenever you want to upgrade parts.

 

[PemLam]

Thanks Asteroid. I have the Samsung EVO SSD and I'm using a Star-Tech SATA hard drive duplicator for the cloning. I'm going to do the swap tonight and will post the results.

 

[Asteroid-Man]

Thanks Asteroid. I have the Samsung EVO SSD and I'm using a Star-Tech SATA hard drive duplicator for the cloning. I'm going to do the swap tonight and will post the results.

I take it it went well?

 

[PemLam]

Sorry, forgot to update you. The duplicator would not clone the drive because it wouldn't allow me to select which partition to do...it was an all or nothing type of thing. I ended up using Apricom's EZ Gig software with a USB 3.0 Sata Wire connection to do it. That went perfectly and I didn't need to reduce the size of the partition the data was on because the software is designed to only copy those sectors that have data on them.

I'm running the new drive on my computer now and it's awesome.

Thanks again for the advice.

 

[Asteroid-Man]

Sorry, forgot to update you. The duplicator would not clone the drive because it wouldn't allow me to select which partition to do...it was an all or nothing type of thing. I ended up using Apricom's EZ Gig software with a USB 3.0 Sata Wire connection to do it. That went perfectly and I didn't need to reduce the size of the partition the data was on because the software is designed to only copy those sectors that have data on them.

I'm running the new drive on my computer now and it's awesome.

Thanks again for the advice.

Glad to hear you got it working! Which duplicator was unsuccessful, Acronis True Image or the STAR-TECH duplicator?

 

[PemLam]

The Star-Tech was unsuccessful because it simply duplicates the entire drive; you can't specify a certain partition. Because the target drive was smaller than the source, it wouldn't complete the duplication.

I didn't use Acronis...I used Apricom's EZ Gig. Acronis works similarly to EZ Gig, so I'm sure it would have worked as well.