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Move Windows To An SSD
What is the best free app to move my Windows XP pro OS from my laptop HDD to a new SSD ? I have two partitions and the SSD is slightly smaller than the HDD but there is plenty of room on the SSD for all the HDD files. I have a USB to drive adapter. I know this is slow since the laptop is USB2 only but that is what I have to work with. |
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#2
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Move Windows To An SSD
BenThere wrote:
What is the best free app to move my Windows XP pro OS from my laptop HDD to a new SSD ? I have two partitions and the SSD is slightly smaller than the HDD but there is plenty of room on the SSD for all the HDD files. I have a USB to drive adapter. I know this is slow since the laptop is USB2 only but that is what I have to work with. Sometimes the SSD company provides a tool. ******* The SATA SSDs I've got, get enough power from USB bus power for the job. And with the limitation of USB2 transfer rates, that helps keep the power used on writes to a lower value. (On NVMe M.2 drives, power is 5 watts or more, so the USB3 adapters that are coming out for that purpose soon, power is going to be a problem for those.) ******* https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree Blue button, half way down the page, on the left. "Home Use" is allowed for Free. Download Macrium Reflect 7 Free Edition That can clone from internal hard drive to a USB external. In the easiest situation, if the last partition on the source drive is the one with excess space, that's the easiest situation to deal with. +-----+-------------+-------------+------------------------+ | MBR | (something) | (something) | "Resize Me" on the fly | Source +-----+-------------+-------------+------------------------+ +-----+-------------+-------------+-------------+ | MBR | (something) | (something) | Now smaller | Destination +-----+-------------+-------------+-------------+ It will probably offer to do that without too much prompting. The idea is, you shouldn't need to make any change to the Source device, to get what you want on the Destination. ******* The Macrium installer obtained from the above web page, is a "stub" downloader. It can download two files. A 60MB installer (enough for your current purpose) and 500+ MB of WinPE5 or WinPE10 files for making an emergency boot CD, You will eventually want an emergency boot CD for future usage (for backups). But for cloning, there isn't an immediate incentive. The emergency boot CD (which it'll prompt you to make after you install the software), it has a Boot Repair menu item. This can be used, if for some reason the Destination drive doesn't boot. That's the strongest incentive so far, to make the CD. But to make the CD, you'd have to download both items using the stub installer thing, if you want to carry out that task immediately. Macrium will also download WinPE5 or WinPE10 on demand later, and as far as I know, the WinPE files come from a Microsoft content distribution network. Paul |
#3
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Move Windows To An SSD
Boris wrote:
Paul wrote in news BenThere wrote: What is the best free app to move my Windows XP pro OS from my laptop HDD to a new SSD ? I have two partitions and the SSD is slightly smaller than the HDD but there is plenty of room on the SSD for all the HDD files. I have a USB to drive adapter. I know this is slow since the laptop is USB2 only but that is what I have to work with. Sometimes the SSD company provides a tool. ******* The SATA SSDs I've got, get enough power from USB bus power for the job. And with the limitation of USB2 transfer rates, that helps keep the power used on writes to a lower value. (On NVMe M.2 drives, power is 5 watts or more, so the USB3 adapters that are coming out for that purpose soon, power is going to be a problem for those.) ******* https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree Blue button, half way down the page, on the left. "Home Use" is allowed for Free. Download Macrium Reflect 7 Free Edition That can clone from internal hard drive to a USB external. In the easiest situation, if the last partition on the source drive is the one with excess space, that's the easiest situation to deal with. +-----+-------------+-------------+------------------------+ | MBR | (something) | (something) | "Resize Me" on the fly | Source +-----+-------------+-------------+------------------------+ +-----+-------------+-------------+-------------+ | MBR | (something) | (something) | Now smaller | Destination +-----+-------------+-------------+-------------+ It will probably offer to do that without too much prompting. The idea is, you shouldn't need to make any change to the Source device, to get what you want on the Destination. I'm a little confused. You show "Resize Me" on the fly, and also say you shouldn't have to make any changes to the Source device. Do you mean that the Source drive will not 'physically' be resized, but only take on the size of the data when cloned to the smaller SSD? That is, if the data on the Source drive is 400GB, but the partion is 700GB, the new SSD partition will be 400GB (or whatever size the user specifies, that will hold both the data and whatever extra space the user desires, up to the reamining space on the SSD)? Thanks. The source disk is not modified. The assumption (with regard to this picture) is, that the source disk doesn't have 110GB of data on a 200GB partition. As shrinking the partition to 100GB, would leave some data stranded and that wouldn't work. Here, you can see the amount of data involved, is smaller than 200GB or 100GB and can fit on either device. +-----+-------------+-------------+-----------------------------+ | MBR | (something) | (something) | 20GB on 200GB partition | Source +-----+-------------+-------------+-----------------------------+ +-----+-------------+-------------+---------------+ | MBR | (something) | (something) | 20GB on 100GB | Destination +-----+-------------+-------------+---------------+ If the last partition has "slack space", Macrium will automatically offer to make the source fit the destination, and reduce the amount of slack on the last partition. If you want to adjust the size of any other partition, you are on your own. And must rely on your own wit and reflexes to get the job done. If you clone the partitions one at a time, all sorts of opportunities present themselves. If you want to "practice", try practicing with two HDD, since writes cost nothing on a HDD. It's better using some old HDD for experiments, than burning up write life on the SSD doing "experiments" on them directly. And I do recommend experimenting, because I actually learned a few things by accident while fooling around. Like the "resize" menu, which you can get to by clicking "Next" then "Back" after the basic transfer is defined, then right-click a partition (as instructed by a prompt at the bottom of the screen) - you can resize or re-align partitions there. Alignment options include CHS or megabyte (Win7) type alignment. Megabyte alignment is *great* for SSDs, and is why that alignment was invented by MS. Paul |
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