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... and the story of a frustrating evening trying to do so (even more so when I finally found out how to do it). Mostly a rant-ish story, so feel free to ignore, but there is a question at the end.
tl:dr - I'm an idiot; Windows 7 is a right PITA for this, but was also a solution.
My 80Gb Intel SSD was getting rather full (67Gb, bloody programs and games storing info on C:), so decided to upgrade to a Samsung 256Gb 830 series. £150 on Today Only from Scan + £20 cashback. Nice. (Jazz Club voice for those of you who remember that...)
Got it yesterday, but did a 15+ hour day at work, so wasn't in the mood when I got in unsurprisingly. Decided to tackle it tonight.
Quick Google on how to mirror the drive to the new one and find out Win 7 Pro has software RAID 1 to do it for you. Great. Mirror my C: drive to the Samsung and then try to break the mirror. Can't because I'm currently using it as my boot plex. Fair enough. Another Google brings up a quick solution using Diskpart, which was successful. Smashing. Shut down PC, unplug the Intel and boot of the Samsung, expect it's not bootable. Hmm. Another Google says that the boot part is the 100Mb partition that I ignored as thinking it was something to do with it being a SSD. Interesting. Further probing shows that I can use Windows Backup image to do a better job, but there were a couple of warnings about it copying the device ID over as well, so might not boot without a repair disc. Take note of that info, but leave it as that for the time being.
So I come to the crux of my frustration; making a system image. Firstly, I have a 1.5Tb data HD attached, of which it decided to make an image of one of the partitions which I couldn't deselect. That made the whole image too large to put anywhere. Not good. Easy solution though, restart with it unplugged; can't backup something it can't see. The image is now more managable and I dig out a USB HDD to put it on. However, backup fails complaining of lack of space, even though there is twice the space required available. G'ah! Another Google and this is a common error... and there doesn't seem to be a simple answer. It seems mainly to do with the amount of space on the 100Mb boot partition. And this is what was pissing me off most of the evening. The solutions and reasons being supplied aren't exactly straight-forward, so how the hell would someone like my parents be able to create this sort of back-ups?
After cursing at Microsoft for being so bloody lame and useless, decided to look if I got anything with the drive to help (had noticed it came up as suggestions in a few posts). Sure enough, Samsung provide you with Norton Ghost. Well, sort of. Turned out the one I ordered didn't (LN44945). If I had spent £3 more (LN43331), I would have done, which brings up the question of it's really "free" in that case. Anyway, decide to look at the CD to see what I've got, and install Magician. There's an option to clone you HDD. Brilliant. Instead it tells me to install Ghost. Do that, and it asks for a licence key. Not expecting to find one, but have a look at all the codes and numbers in and around the box, but none there. Do get the option for a 30 day trial. That'll do; expect it won't let me copy my HDD unless I register. Buggar.
So I suddenly think about the first thing I did and wonder if I could simply clone the 100Mb partition as well as the C: part. Turns out you can; pretty obvious now looking back (thus the wasted time and frustration). I also recall about drive IDs, so decided to make a repair disc. Figured Win 7 rolled with the times and tried a USB stick, which it ignored (to be fair it only had 2.5Gb free space) and can only select my DVD RW drive. No matter, I remember seeing some when I moved, if I could only remember where I put them! This time I decide not to break the mirror (there are 2 mirrors; one's hidden and I wasn't confident about using Diskpart again), but rather just shut down and unplug the Intel and try to boot off the Samsung again. Get an option of two Window 7 partitions, and try the first one and get the error that it can't find the drive ID. Ah ha! Boot the repair DVD, but it fails to see the partition to repair. Decide to try and boot the "second plex" version of Windows, and we have success! Everything looks the same. A bit of fiddling in Disk Management to remove the mirrors of the HDD that isn't there, then I'm able to expand the partition to the full 256Gb and a lot more breathing room.
However, I now always have 2 options when I boot. I've set it up to select the "Second plex" version by default and have turned the timer down, but was wondering if there was now any way of getting rid of one, or whether just continuously booting into the second one will have any long term problems down the line?
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Originally Posted by dangel
