Moving Win7 to a new partition

[edgars70]

Hi

I run window 7 on my pc. I recently bought a SSD (kingston 96gb V100+) and wanted to move my existing win7 partition on to the ssd.

My pc is set up
Disk 1: - 1Tb HDD partition thus
100mb Win7 reserved area,
80gb Win7 installation + apps (C: drive)
rest of disk space for apps (D: drive)
Disk 2&3 RAID 1 for data (E: drive) - bios is set to RAID

I've installed the SSD and used gparted live to copy the 100mb and 80gb Win7 partitions to the SSD. I switched the bios settings so that pc booted from DVD and also set the SSD to be the first disk to boot from. I then started my pc and went into my win7 DVD disk, did a repair disk and then restarted.

Now, when my pc starts, I have two windows installations to choose from. I choose the Win7 that is on my SSD and it starts up ok. However, when I log in, my win7 is running from my SSD which has been mapped to I: drive. My original C: drive (hdd) is still available, but all my apps are still loading from the C: (hdd) drive and not the I: (ssd) drive. In fact, I was expecting the SSD to appear as the C: drive and the original C; drive to be unmapped.

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong? I really do not want to reinstall windows.

Thanks

[Splash]

Login to Windows, then right click Computer>Manage. When Computer Management opens click on Disk Management. Right click on your old C: drive>Change Drive Letter And Paths and then Remove. Once this is done right click your new partition and click Change Drive Letter and Paths and click Change. You should now be able to reassign the drive letter as C: and your old windows install will be unmapped.

[edgars70]

I tried that and it doesn't work. Windows allows you to change the drive letter of the c: drive, but not the os drive (I: in this case). I tried it anyway and windows locked up. I guess that is because the apps are on the c: drive.

I also tried parition manager and gparted and neither allow me to change the drive letter of the os drive.

[shaithis]

Try with only the SSD attached first. You may find that Windows is currently booting across 2 partitions and there is an underlying issue you need to fix that will make it pop back into place as C.

I've tried doing it the GParted way and found W7 to be fickle about it. I now just shrink the source partition (if necessary) then use Windows Backup to an external drive or NAS and then connect the new drive on its own and restore the backup.

[Apex]

This seems odd; was the copy done outside of windows or while windows was running ?

My own way of dealing with this would be to

remove the data from the ssd and remove the partition from the ssd (make it blank and removes any windows drive assignments)

boot the machine with what ever clone software you have and reclone the partions you need

shutdown, unplug the 1tb hdd and the dvd rom drive and raid but am unsure of what will happen if you do this (data loss ?), put the ssd onto the sata1 port and check it is seen in bios and attempt to boot

If all goes well the machine should boot and you should only see one drive (C); once happy with that i would then shut down and plug the 1tb hdd back in and before booting into windows boot what ever partition sw you have and remove the reserved and system partitions from it (you could go one set futher before this and disconnect the ssd to make sure that the only drive you are removing partitions from is the 1tb hdd)

I would then use the same software to expand D to use the entire disk or leave it as is (not sure you can change drive assignments with most of the clone sw out there; might be able to make the orignal system and reserved partirions as hidden)

You could run into issues like it will boot but some apps might not run (might be pointing to D which can not be seen any more)

What slighty makes this trickier is the fact you have a raid array running and am loathed to ever mess with a machine when it has a array running.

Side note the SSD might have got the drive letter "I" assigned because Windows is seeing the device as a removeable device.

Is the data that important ? if not i would go for a fresh install with only the ssd and dvd rom drive just depends on how important the data is and how the raid comes into this....

[edgars70]

Thanks guys, I will give the suggestions ago, probably at the weekend.

I also saw this thread and it looks promising too windows-7-boot-up-problem

I've spent hours booting, rebooting, partititoning and backing up. I thought SSDs were supposed to make things faster . The SSD I bought has dropped in price too - arrgh.