Ghosting a HDD or WHatever It Is Called??
jedihobbit
Central Virginia, USA New
Okay time for another noob question concerning HDDs......
With the permanent and untimely demise of both Celtic Spirit and KestrelFlight it appears I will be venturing into the dark side with an Alienware M18X.
Now the hardware related question(s).....I want to replace the "stock" 350GB HDD (Primary) with the G. Skill 120GB SSD that had been slated for the H2O version of KestrelFlight. How does one move everything from the 350 to the 120?
With the permanent and untimely demise of both Celtic Spirit and KestrelFlight it appears I will be venturing into the dark side with an Alienware M18X.
Now the hardware related question(s).....I want to replace the "stock" 350GB HDD (Primary) with the G. Skill 120GB SSD that had been slated for the H2O version of KestrelFlight. How does one move everything from the 350 to the 120?
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Comments
Burn a linux live cd (ubuntu will work)
If you want a GUI-only solution:
Another linux based solution
You will need to resize the partition to max it out afterward. I'm not sure, and don't want to look right now, but I think there is some reticence about having the recovery partition on an SSD, but I could be mistaken or that could have been poor thinking on whoever I saw post that.
You can then use dd as Tushon mentioned to copy all data from one drive to another. If you want to go with something a bit more user friendly, you should burn a CloneZilla live CD which will walk you through copying an image from one disk to another. CloneZilla can also dump a disk image to a file if you don't have a way to hook up the SSD and the original drive at the same time. You can then install the SSD and use CloneZilla to restore the image to the SSD.
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/zlon-disk-cloning.htm
I've used it for personal stuff when upgrading to SSD as well, no issues, boot up and go.
Just plug in the SSD and you can fill it with what you want from your current drive.
However, in my experience it is much better that you simply install a clean copy of Windows on the new drive and then re-install your programs and restore any personal data from the old drive to the new one. Especially if you are making a big hardware change, like a whole new computer...
Also, have you shopped around for the SSD or bought the G-Skill one yet? There are better SSD drives out there than the G-Skill lineup. Also, make sure you know if your new laptop will have SATA3 or SATA2, that will make a difference as to what SSD you should get.
And as for the Linux way of ghosting, the dd command mentioned above works like a charm. It takes quite a while but it works very well. I cloned my home Linux server's 73GB SCSI drive to an identical 73GB SCSI drive as a backup and it was smooth and painless.