Just bought a SSD drive and want to transfer W7 over onto it?

marc512

marc512

marc512

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How can i transfer my current os over onto my SSD?
i was thinking of installing it again but on the ssd drive...which means ill have 2 operating systems..if i did it that way can i uninstall w7 on my HDD?
 
More informed people can help but if you try to install again on a new hard drive and dual boot it will keep your old boot sector on your old drive. If you format you could lose your boot sector for your SSD.

Dunno if that makes sense.

The way I did it with XP was to take out my old drive then install Win 7 put the old drive back in and use Easy BCD to change the boot setup on my new drive to dual boot XP.
 
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Use some imaging software to copy the old drive exactly to the new drive. You may be able to use the Win 7 backup feature for this. I do know if you use Acronis you need to a sector by sector copy to keep the drive alignment correct for SSDs.

For neatness make sure your boot drive is port 0 or 1, and your BIOS is set to boot from that HD.

When you're back in Windows, check that it's booted from the correct drive in Disk Management and then you can format the old drive to use for data/storage or even take it out if no longer needed.
 
I found if I make an exact copy of one OS and place it on another drive and then select which drive I want to boot from it causes problems as I see two C_drives.
If your wiping the old version this wouldn't be a problem.
 
Yeah, clone first then disconnect the source drive once cloned. Reboot into Windows on the SSD and connect the source drive and simply wipe it from disk management as it will likely be there just not "activated" due to drive letter conflict.

This is assuming you have AHCI enabled to allow for hotswapping SATA devices :)

Don't forget to optimise for an SSD drive afterwards - since you're not installing fresh on an SSD you will need to manually tweak the OS.
 
complicated stuff :( what about putting the SSD in and treating it like the pc has never started up before and putting the W7 disc in and installing ? then after its installed
put the HD in another pc and wipe the content completely?
 
surely if you boot from SSD with win 7 installed your old HDD will just be assigned the next available letter by Win 7 (D,E, F or something other.) It's the operating software that assigns the drive letters BOIS uses numbers.
 
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