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I have a laptop with two SATA drive bays (yes, it's heavy and huge, and I like it that way). I recently acquired a 256 GB Samsung 840 SSD drive. The ~650GB HDD has 400 GB used, most of it in media files (I do a lot of Photoshop, Lightroom, etc., and uncompressed panoramas take up MAJOR space). I don't want to move those. I just want to move my Program Files, Windows, and Desktop directories.
The problem is Samsung's included software is slow and buggy, and takes forever to do an entire scan of my drive for "media files". Not only that, but I also have a StarTech external SATA/EIDE USB 3.0 drive bay. I've had nothing but success with it, but not now. Rather than recognize my SSD as a valid drive once inserted, it lights up and connects to Windows as a normal SSD device, but will not create a drive letter for it.
So I have two questions:
1) Is it possible to manually clone my SSD and use it as my main drive (C:\) with just Windows and the program files?
I have a laptop with two SATA drive bays (yes, it's heavy and huge, and I like it that way). I recently acquired a 256 GB Samsung 840 SSD drive. The ~650GB HDD has 400 GB used, most of it in media files (I do a lot of Photoshop, Lightroom, etc., and uncompressed panoramas take up MAJOR space). I don't want to move those. I just want to move my Program Files, Windows, and Desktop directories.
The problem is Samsung's included software is slow and buggy, and takes forever to do an entire scan of my drive for "media files". Not only that, but I also have a StarTech external SATA/EIDE USB 3.0 drive bay. I've had nothing but success with it, but not now. Rather than recognize my SSD as a valid drive once inserted, it lights up and connects to Windows as a normal SSD device, but will not create a drive letter for it.
So I have two questions:
1) Is it possible to manually clone my SSD and use it as my main drive (C:\) with just Windows and the program files?
2) How do you go about doing this?
I have installed SSd drives in all my shop PCs, my home desktop, my wife's desktop and my wife's laptop. Dramatic difference in bootup speed and program launch speed. indeed, it makes perfect sense to have programs on an SSd drive and big media files on a conventional drive.
You do back up your laptop I hope? Perhaps to an external USB drive? You mention an external drive bay, what do you use it for?
Rather than recognize my SSD as a valid drive once inserted, it lights up and connects to Windows as a normal SSD device, but will not create a drive letter for it.
So I have two questions:
1) Is it possible to manually clone my SSD and use it as my main drive (C:\) with just Windows and the program files?
2) How do you go about doing this?
You won't get a drive letter until you create a partition or volume on the drive, that is what gets assigned a drive letter, not the physical drive.
Cloning a hard drive is just that, an exact copy, you can't by definition clone a drive and not include everything. I personally haven't seen any software that can do what you want (doesn't mean it doesn't exist though).
I have a laptop with two SATA drive bays (yes, it's heavy and huge, and I like it that way). I recently acquired a 256 GB Samsung 840 SSD drive. The ~650GB HDD has 400 GB used, most of it in media files (I do a lot of Photoshop, Lightroom, etc., and uncompressed panoramas take up MAJOR space). I don't want to move those. I just want to move my Program Files, Windows, and Desktop directories.
The problem is Samsung's included software is slow and buggy, and takes forever to do an entire scan of my drive for "media files". Not only that, but I also have a StarTech external SATA/EIDE USB 3.0 drive bay. I've had nothing but success with it, but not now. Rather than recognize my SSD as a valid drive once inserted, it lights up and connects to Windows as a normal SSD device, but will not create a drive letter for it.
So I have two questions:
1) Is it possible to manually clone my SSD and use it as my main drive (C:\) with just Windows and the program files?
2) How do you go about doing this?
I'm considering going to an SSD drive myself at some point.
Below is a great article I found on this a few days ago:
1. Offload all your media files to another drive. Make sure that you get enough data off of the first drive so that the space still being used is less than the capacity of your new drive.
I have installed SSd drives in all my shop PCs, my home desktop, my wife's desktop and my wife's laptop. Dramatic difference in bootup speed and program launch speed. indeed, it makes perfect sense to have programs on an SSd drive and big media files on a conventional drive.
You do back up your laptop I hope? Perhaps to an external USB drive? You mention an external drive bay, what do you use it for?
What is your operating system?
The answers to these questions will help.
Don in Austin
Duh, Windows 8.1. Should have mentioned that in the original post...
I back up important files to flash cards. But I still want to keep my RAW photos and the like...
Okay, so I transferred enough files to another hard drive I happened to have from a previous laptop that overheated. All well there.
Now more problems...Samsung's ill-translated "Data Migration" program refuses to clone more than 3 GB (that's the farthest I've gotten it to go), giving me "Defragmentation Errors". I ran chkdsk -f at boot up, waited three hours, booted Windows normally, and no joy...it still won't go past x MB.
Can I just get around this by using Clonezilla? That's what I'm downloading right now. At least Linux utilities are clear in saying what's wrong, unlike most newer Windows programs I've used.
Okay, so I transferred enough files to another hard drive I happened to have from a previous laptop that overheated. All well there.
Now more problems...Samsung's ill-translated "Data Migration" program refuses to clone more than 3 GB (that's the farthest I've gotten it to go), giving me "Defragmentation Errors". I ran chkdsk -f at boot up, waited three hours, booted Windows normally, and no joy...it still won't go past x MB.
Can I just get around this by using Clonezilla? That's what I'm downloading right now. At least Linux utilities are clear in saying what's wrong, unlike most newer Windows programs I've used.
Did you look at my link which I posted above?
Quote:
Step One: Defrag and Back Up Your Data
Before you start, you probably want to defragment your disk. Click the Start menu and type in "defrag", hitting Disk Defragmenter when it comes up. Run one last defrag before you continue.
Can I just get around this by using Clonezilla? That's what I'm downloading right now. At least Linux utilities are clear in saying what's wrong, unlike most newer Windows programs I've used.
You need to use cloning software that is SSD aware, otherwise your partition alignment on the SSD will be off resulting in performance issues.
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