What you’ll need: your old hard drive; a back-up drive, either internal
or external; a blank CD-R/DVD-R or the Windows 7 installation disc and your
new SSD.
Step 1: Shrinking your original partition to fit on the smaller
First make sure your original OS drive only contains two partitions -- the
system reserved partition and the partition that houses your OS. If you
have any others, back everything up from them onto the backup disk as
you'll lose them in this process.
Once that’s done, it’s time to
shrink your OS partition so it will fit inside the SSD, which is likely
to be smaller than the older OS drive. Go to the start menu and
right-click 'Computer' before selecting 'Manage'.
Select 'Disk Management' on the left, just under the 'Storage' header.
Right-click
your OS partition, which is usually labelled as C:, and then select
'Shrink Volume'. The computer will think for a moment as it queries the
volume for available shrink space.
In 'Enter the amount of space
to shrink in MB', enter a value that's at least 10% smaller than the
usable capacity of your new SSD. For example, if you’re moving over to a
120GB SSD, enter 100,000 to be safe.
If you can’t shrink the
partition enough, try defragging the drive first. If that fails, you’ll
need to start uninstalling applications from C:. Do this until you’re
able to shrink the drive enough. Once it’s shrunk, your new OS partition
will be small enough to fit inside your SSD.
Step 2: Create an image of the now shrunken OS drive
Plug
in your backup drive, be it an external drive or an internal drive. It
must be bigger than the size of your shrunken original OS partition.
Head to the control panel and double-click the 'Backup and Restore' option.
On
the left-hand side, select 'Create a system image'. During the backup
wizard, it will ask where you want to store the new image -- select your
backup drive.
Start the backup and then hurry up and wait -- this can take up to 15 minutes or more to complete.
Once
it's finished, you’ll be asked if you want to create a system repair
disc. If you don’t have your Windows 7 installation disc, select yes and
it will guide you through the creation of a system repair disc. If you
do have your Windows 7 installation disc, select no. Then shut down your
PC.
Step 3: Install the new hard drive and restore from the image
We’re
halfway there -- now it’s time to set up the new drive. Firstly, open
your PC case and disconnect all of your drives except for the backup
disk. Plug in your new SSD as described in our photo tutorial this week.
After double-checking all your connections, boot up your system and
insert the repair disc or Windows Install disc in your optical drive.
The
computer should boot from the optical disc and at the first screen
select the 'Repair your computer' option. Then select the 'Restore your
computer using a system image that you created earlier' option from the
next screen before clicking next.
On the next screen, select the 'Use the latest available system image (recommended)' option and then click next.
Now you need to double-check you’re not going to wipe any other drives, so click the 'Exclude disks' button.
You
should only see one hard drive in the list -- if there are any more,
make sure they’re selected with a tick mark otherwise they’ll be erased.
Click 'Next' and finally, 'Finish'. A warning sign will pop up, asking if you’re sure you want to continue -- select Yes.
If
this process fails, it means your shrunken partition still wasn’t small
enough, so you’ll need to go back to Step 1 and uninstall more
applications before shrinking and mirroring the drive again.
If this process works, you’ll be prompted to restart your computer. Click 'Don’t restart', and then click 'Shutdown'.
Step 4: Final Steps
Plug
all your other drives back in, but don't plug the original OS drive in
at this point. If you want to use that drive, save it for later -- our
priority now is to make sure the new drive is working.
Boot the PC up -- Windows should load from your SSD, though it may need a reboot once it's detected a new device in the SSD.
It’s
time to go back into the Disk Management area. Go to the start menu,
right-click 'Computer' and select 'Manage'. Once again, head into the
same 'Disk Management' section on the left as you did in Step 1.
Right-click your new OS partition (again, usually called C:) and select 'Extend Volume', then click next.
Don’t
adjust any of the default values -- Windows will automatically
calculate exactly how far you can extend the partition to fill your new
SSD. Click Next and then Finish, and your partition will be extended to
fill the SSD.
Finally, we need to enter a single command via the
command prompt in administrator mode. Go to 'Start > All programs
> Accessories', then right-click 'Command Prompt' and run it as an
administrator. Type this command at the command prompt:
winsat disk
This
command makes Windows detect the new drive as an SSD and thus enable
all the features unique to these drives. You’re now good to go!
