How to Upgrade a Hard Disk

[awemawson]

Shouldn't be difficult should it - done it many times before, but this time it's driving me bonkers 

It's a Dell 7010 Ultra Small Form Factor Intel Core i3 3220 3.30Ghz, 4GB Ram, 320Gb Hdd with (OEM)Win 7 pre-loaded. HDD and CD are both SATA

What I'm trying to do is replace the disc with an SSD one. So, create a system image, create a system restore CD, physically replace the HDD with the SSD one, boot off the system restore CD, and load up the image to the new drive. How hard can it be 

Well the first issue is this PC has only two SATA ports, one dedicated to the hard disc, the other to the CD - so nowhere to put the system image except on a network drive.

So I've generated a system image successfully across the network, swapped the drives, booted off the system restore CD , poined it at the image (which it sees) but it refuses to use it for restore 

So I've attached a 1 TB USB drive to the system,  generated another system image, but again it refuses to use it to restore 

So I've installed the new disc in another PC that has more SATA ports, booted off the restore CD, but it won't load the image 

Now there's nothing particularly important on the original drive except the operating system, so I thought if I did a clean install using one of my genuine Win7 professional 64 bit distribution CDs and use the Certificate of Authenticity number off the PC as it's definitely genuine I should end up good to go. Loads up fine, runs, but the COA won't authenticate - presumably it needs to be loaded from a Dell OEM version of Win 7 professional 

... argh my head hurts

Current 'plan' is to pull the internal CD thus releasing it's SATA port, install an external CD reader via USB, and try and do a back up and restore internal to the PC - so USB CD reader on order !

... why do I hate PC's ...... I wonder 

[Joules]

Can you not remove the CD, install the SSD then use disk utilities to transfer the HDD to SSD (mirror?) I think you need to mess about making the SSD partition bootable.  I left the world of PC's many years ago and detest getting dragged back to fix them.   

[seadog]

I'm just about to do this myself Andrew. In fact, ordered an SSD and carrier 20 minutes ago. My first thought is, is  the image too large for the new disk? Does your cloning software allow you to copy to a smaller partition? Can you create a smaller image, Win7 allows partition re-sizing on the fly.

[Brass_Machine]

Andrew,

I just went through this. I used ghost to create the image. No need for a system restore CD.

Plug the USB drive in. Boot with FalconFour CD (or ISO on thumb drive). Run ghost and put the image on the USB drive. Swap your physical drives and then ghost it back.

Or

Swap your SSD and CD-Rom, Boot FalconFour from USB thumb drive and just clone (ghost) from one drive to the other.

FalconFour CD: http://old.falconfour.com/projects/7  free to download

Eric

[Brass_Machine]

I'm just about to do this myself Andrew. In fact, ordered an SSD and carrier 20 minutes ago. My first thought is, is  the image too large for the new disk? Does your cloning software allow you to copy to a smaller partition? Can you create a smaller image, Win7 allows partition re-sizing on the fly.

Read the above post. it allows for re-sizing of the disk.

[awemawson]

The image is about 28 Gb so much smaller than the target SSD which is 256 Gb. The transfer software I'm using is the image & restore fcility in Backup & Restore on control panel.  This generates a bootable CD to kickstart the operation. I'm not aware of a mirror function that would clone in this situation but, like Prince Charles, I'm all ears 

[Brass_Machine]

Andrew... Ghost allows re-sizing. See my above post.

[Brass_Machine]

PM Sent. I can walk you through this.

[David Jupp]

The Samsung SSD either comes with their own cloning software, or you can download it from their site.

Weird things can happen though - I have wasted many hours trying to get a SSD to work correctly in my Samsung notebook, it kind of works but I have a strange boot delay (still in discussion with Samsung about that).

My point is that the PC itself could potentially have an issue with SSDs - maybe check if there are any BIOS updates available. Things seem to be much more complex with UEFI than they ever were in the old days.

You may also have to clear the CMOS memory of the PC to 'forget' the old HDD.

Good luck!

[awemawson]

Well did you all hear the whoop of joy coming from East Sussex 

Today at long last I have finally cloned my original hard drive onto the Samsung SSD and it works - but oh what a a palaver - and many thanks to those who offered helpful suggestions.

The critical thing was the arrival today of the ordered "USB 3 to 2.5" SATA" cable - now the software that Samsung supply with the drive expects to access the new SSD this way - BUT IT COULDN'T 

As I didn't have the cable, initially I'd tried a 'back up and restore' using the Windows 7 inbuilt facility, but it hadn't worked, but had written something to the SSD drive.  Then I'd tried a 'universal SATA transfer kit' but the connectors were of such appallingly poor quality, they literally fell apart on first use so I wasn't prepared to trust my data and disk to this rubbish hence buying the dedicated cable.

The Samsung cloning software claimed that it couldn't see the SSD drive - I could see and identify it under 'Device Manager' on the control panel, and also in 'Disk Management but it was inactive. Eventually I found that Windows 7 was refusing to mount the drive due to "Drive Signature Collision".

The only way I could get past this error was to use the Windows 7 command level to run 'DISKPART', and with my heart in my mouth delete the two partitions that Restore had created on this drive. Then returning to Disk Management in Control Panel, I could create a new volume and format it NTFS.

So now it works, reboots amazingly quickly, and I'm off to download Fusion 360 which is what this was all about in the first place 

[seadog]

Good news Andrew. My SSD upgrade went well too. I'm now running Windows 10 and the machine is lightning fast.   

[Pete W.]

Hi there, all,

The following may approach being  my only excuse is that it concerns solid state hard drives (aka 'SSHD')

I'll start by saying that my understanding of SSHDs is incomplete.  It could even be completely mistaken - in that event I welcome correction and enlightenment.

As I understand it, the way SSHDs operate means that they have an intrinsic limit on write cycles.  One consequence of that is that you shouldn't defrag (the internal housekeeping is doing something like that all the time anyway).

On my own (non-SSHD) computer, I employ, when necessary, software by Jetico called BCWipe.  This wipes by over-writing either selected files or so-called free space with multiple bit sequences.  (CCleaner does substantially the same thing.)  I recently received an email from Jetico inviting me to participate in a survey concerning wiping of SSHDs.  This was to gather data to lobby the SSHD trade association to address an alleged problem with secure wiping of files from SSHDs.  If anyone is interested in this, I'll post the URL leading to the survey.

Now of course, the modus operandi of an SSHD is quite different from that of a 'conventional' hard drive using magnetic platters.  Still, 'deleting' files, as Windows does, by changing one character in the file name to an illegal character will no more actually remove the file from an SSHD than it does from a 'conventional' drive.  So for some users the need for secure file wiping is still there for SSHDs but is more costly of drive-life if the sequential over-writing employed by BCWipe, CCleaner et alia is using up precious write cycles.  For Mac users, Apple's 'secure trash' poses the same danger.

I don't have all the answers on this topic so I'm not able to offer a conclusion - I look forward to other Modders' contributions on this topic. 

[seadog]

That was my opinion too Andrew. However, it seems that earlier fears were just that, fears, and were not based on ant evidence. Here's a link to a long term test of several SSDs - http://www.pcworld.com/article/2856052/grueling-endurance-test-blows-away-ssd-durability-fears.html

It seems to be a similar fear to that which followed the announcement of CDs, and that they would become unreadable, due to ink degradation, within a few years. As far as I'm aware, that too has proven to be unfounded.

[awemawson]

Seadog, that post was by Pete - not me 

Well I've installed two SSD's now - both Samsungs:

A/ Samsung 850 250GB EVO 2.5" SSD SATAIII 540MB/s MZ-75E250B/CN which is guaranteed against loss of read/write for 3 years

and

B/ Samsung SAM 850 Pro 256GB MZ-7KE256BW which is guaranteed against loss of read/write for 10 years

Reading the various on line reviews the consensus seemed to be that there was little difference in performance and although the second one was covered for an extra seven years, the likelihood is that the  system life would have expired by then so why bother!

In fact, it was the second type I've just installed, but only as I got a very good on line price for one.

[seadog]

Apologies Andrew.

Graham 

[Pete W.]

Hi there, Andrew and Seadog,

Well, should I go               and  ??

At least we've given that particular bogeyman an airing!!