moving to a SSD boot drive - clone suggestions?

[tvmaster2]

picked up a nice size (90g Corsair) from Frys on sale this week with the idea of converting to SSD as my SageTV server boot drive.

anyone have suggestions on their favorite cloning software/procedures?

My MB is limited to SATA II; 3gb bandwidth (the drive is SATA III - which I hope won't be a problem)

[BobPhoenix]

"Acronis Disk Director" from a boot CD. Make sure you set the boot partition to "Active" when you copy your boot drive. You should be fine with SataIII drive on SataII controller from everything I've read it should work fine - just don't have personal experience.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

"Acronis Disk Director" from a boot CD. Make sure you set the boot partition to "Active" when you copy your boot drive. You should be fine with SataIII drive on SataII controller from everything I've read it should work fine - just don't have personal experience.

Disk Director, not True Image?

[MattHelm]

Make sure the alignment is correct when finished!!!
(VERY important for SSD's! If it was a new install on W7, it isn't an issue, but since you are cloning, make sure it is correct, after.)

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

Disk Director, not True Image?

True Image would work but I don't remember if you can clone a partition without creating a backup file first. I use them for there original purpose. True Image for image backups of files/disks/partitions and Disk Director for resizing/partitioning/moving/copying.

[panteragstk]

Not trying to put extra work on you, but why not just reinstall fresh from the beginning? I realize it is a pain, but there is a big debate going on whether or not cloning from a non-ssd to an ssd is a good idea because of the differences in the way W7 installs, making sure TRIM is enabled and whatnot.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

Not trying to put extra work on you, but why not just reinstall fresh from the beginning? I realize it is a pain, but there is a big debate going on whether or not cloning from a non-ssd to an ssd is a good idea because of the differences in the way W7 installs, making sure TRIM is enabled and whatnot.

Quite true. When I copied my partition it was from a 40GB SSD to an 80GB SSD for one of my SageTV servers. When I virtualized two others I installed from scratch and just copied the wiz.bin/wiz.bak after setup up of OS and SageTV from scratch.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

True Image would work but I don't remember if you can clone a partition without creating a backup file first. I use them for there original purpose. True Image for image backups of files/disks/partitions and Disk Director for resizing/partitioning/moving/copying.

Yes, TruImage has a Clone utility - I just upgraded my boot drive to SSD last week and used TruImage. One caveat - the Clone utility wants to clone the entire disk (all partitions). So, if you have more than one partition on your HDD, you can't just clone the boot partition. It will re-size the partitions to fit on the SSD (if it can).

In my case, I went from a 500GB HDD to a 128GB SSD. My HDD had two partitions (C and E), but were only using about 100GB between them. I used the Acronis Clone utility to clone the disk. Then I shut down and swapped the SATA cables between SSD and HDD and re-booted. At that point I was booting from the SSD and it had C and E, but the HDD was still there and Windows assigned different drive letters to the original C and E partitions. I deleted E from the SSD and re-sized the C partition to use the whole SSD. Finally, I went back and re-assigned the "E" label to my original E partition on the HDD.

Since I was starting with Windows 7, I don't think alignment should be an issue.

TRIM is another topic. My understanding is that for Windows to handle TRIM, you must have Windows 7 and your BIOS must be set to use AHCI mode for your boot disk. However, if you enable AHCI in your BIOS after you install Windows, your computer may not boot because it won't have the proper AHCI driver installed. There are many articles floating around that explain how to correct this by tweaking a registry setting. Otherwise, you have to be sure to set the BIOS correctly before installing Windows 7.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by Tiki

Since I was starting with Windows 7, I don't think alignment should be an issue.

I'd get a checker and make sure. If it isn't aligned, it can really hurt the live of the SSD. Like you said, it SHOULD be OK.

Originally Posted by Tiki

... However, if you enable AHCI in your BIOS after you install Windows, your computer may not boot because it won't have the proper AHCI driver installed. There are many articles floating around that explain how to correct this by tweaking a registry setting. Otherwise, you have to be sure to set the BIOS correctly before installing Windows 7.

With Vista and 7, you SHOULD be able to switch modes (95% chance), as they come with a generic AHCI driver in Windows. I've done this. It was XP you could not switch modes.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

With Vista and 7, you SHOULD be able to switch modes (95% chance), as they come with a generic AHCI driver in Windows. I've done this. It was XP you could not switch modes.

I haven't gotten around to testing yet myself, but from what I've read, the Windows 7 installer checks to see if AHCI is enabled in the BIOS during installation and if it is not needed, it disables the driver to allow for faster boots. So, if you go back and enable it in the BIOS after installation, it isn't smart enough to detect it an re-enable it and so it won't boot. That's why they say you have to go into the registry to enable the driver before you go into the BIOS and enable AHCI.

But you are right that Win 7 does have a generic driver available that should work (As long as it gets enabled).

When I get some time, I will check it out.

[macsupergeek]

Maybe it was the lack of a proper AHCI driver. Maybe it was TRIM or alignment. But I copied my boot drive from a 500gb SATA to a 120gb Corsair SSD and used it for about a week. It was nice and fast, then one day I got a call that my wife and kids they couldn't watch TV. I tried to remote to the box, no go. When I go home that night I find the box at a BSOD, the drive had failed, had to revert to a backup and the 500gb drive. I then reformatted the SSD and was going to use it as RAM disk and then after about 2 days I come home to find the computer at the BIOS asking for f1 to proceed and the SSD is missing from the lineup. So my foray into SSD was a complete failure. I really want that speed, so I think I will RMA the drive and try again. But I will say that Acronis is the easiest way to go, I use it nightly for my incremental backups, but this next time around I think I will start from scratch and install everything and build it proper, just to make sure I get the SSD set right.

[davephan]

I used Acronis. I can't remember how I did it. Either I used the "Clone Disk" feature, or I recovered an image of the old hard drive to the SSD on my general purpose computer.

I haven't upgraded the SageTV computer to a SSD yet. When the mechanical hard drive fails I will update to an SSD.

You should be able to make the migration with Ghost too. You should own imaging software for your SageTV computer so you can image periodically. I take monthly full images and daily incremental images with Ghost 15. The images are stored on a secondary drive and automatically copied to an unRAID server. I can then easily recover to the previous day if a problem occurs.

Dave

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by macsupergeek

Maybe it was the lack of a proper AHCI driver. Maybe it was TRIM or alignment. But I copied my boot drive from a 500gb SATA to a 120gb Corsair SSD and used it for about a week. It was nice and fast, then one day I got a call that my wife and kids they couldn't watch TV. I tried to remote to the box, no go. When I go home that night I find the box at a BSOD, the drive had failed, had to revert to a backup and the 500gb drive. I then reformatted the SSD and was going to use it as RAM disk and then after about 2 days I come home to find the computer at the BIOS asking for f1 to proceed and the SSD is missing from the lineup. So my foray into SSD was a complete failure. I really want that speed, so I think I will RMA the drive and try again. But I will say that Acronis is the easiest way to go, I use it nightly for my incremental backups, but this next time around I think I will start from scratch and install everything and build it proper, just to make sure I get the SSD set right.

If the SSD is sandforce based then the BSOD is a known issue that a firmware update is supposed to fix. Even if it isn't I'd update the firmware anyway.

If neither of those things work you may be looking at a complete reinstall or a drive replacement. Good luck.

[macsupergeek]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

If the SSD is sandforce based then the BSOD is a known issue that a firmware update is supposed to fix. Even if it isn't I'd update the firmware anyway.

If neither of those things work you may be looking at a complete reinstall or a drive replacement. Good luck.

Its a Force Series 3 120gb and the first thing I did when I pulled the drive was check the firmware -- according to the utility its the same as what is listed as the latest on the website. So now that its out of the picture, I am going to flash it anyway, completely nuke it and do a clean install of everything and then copy in all my directories and settings and see where that gets me. If it fails again then I will do the replacement route. And here I thought buying Corsair was the safest bet out of all the SSD drives. Its just my luck. Same thing happened when I made the switch from my HD-PVRs to Ceton, one card was not behaving and wouldn't pair -- had to do an RMA on that too, at least tech support and process was easy. What annoys me now is that I have two different revs on the cards -- 4884 and 5000, they have the same firmware, but that rev thing just adds another variable. I like it better when stuff just works

[panteragstk]

To be honest the sandforce drives are awesome if you get a good one, but the most reliable drives as of now are Samsung and Crucial. Intel is too, but you pay too much for not that much better of a drive. Having said all that, Intel has a sandforce based drive, but they built their own firmware so it is more reliable that the other drives.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

If the SSD is sandforce based then the BSOD is a known issue that a firmware update is supposed to fix. Even if it isn't I'd update the firmware anyway.

If neither of those things work you may be looking at a complete reinstall or a drive replacement. Good luck.

From what I've read, it was really an Intel driver issue. After they brought theirs out, they had to update their drivers, too!

[Polypro]

Partition Alignment check:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...alignment.html

P

[tvmaster2]

thanks for all the suggestions. I have now tried four different back-up / clone packages (MS W7 imaging - Driveimage XML - True Image and EaseUS. None have produced a working clone on SSD. No matter what is tried, I always get a windows warning in recovery saying either the disc is too small, can't be found, has an error or doesn't exist. I can't remember the last time making a clone of my C partition was such a failure. Anyone else have trouble doing this?

[davephan]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

thanks for all the suggestions. I have now tried four different back-up / clone packages (MS W7 imaging - Driveimage XML - True Image and EaseUS. None have produced a working clone on SSD. No matter what is tried, I always get a windows warning in recovery saying either the disc is too small, can't be found, has an error or doesn't exist. I can't remember the last time making a clone of my C partition was such a failure. Anyone else have trouble doing this?

Are the imaging software solutions you tried licensed or trial versions? Usually the trial versions work for taking the image but the recovery won't work until you license them.

You might also try Clonezilla. Clonezilla is freeware. I don't think I've tried Clonezilla with Windows. I used Clonezilla with Linux before. I could recover a SageTV Linux server in less than 10 minutes with Clonezilla.

Another freeware imaging product I've used is PING, Partition Image is Not Ghost. I was able to take images of a number of Windows computers and recover the images.

Make sure the total used space on the old mechanical hard drive is less than the available free space on the new SSD. None of my testing with Clonezilla and PING was with an SSD, only mechanical drives. I am pretty sure that I used either Acronis True Image 2011 or 2012 disk cloning, or an image to move from a mechanical drive to a SSD on my general purpose computer. I've recovered my general purpose computer's SSD with an image several times with images, and the recovery process work flawlessly with images. Recoveries will be more reliable if your images are stored on hard drives instead of DVDs. Sometimes recoveries with optical media will fail.

Dave

[tvmaster2]

three are freeware, so that isn't the problem. there seems to be great confusion regarding size of partition vs size of drive. I have a 1TB HDD, but the boot partition is only 60G. My SSD is 90G. The people who have used MS built-in image with W7 claim that partition size is all that matters. My concern is one of a hardware issue, as I have tried everything possible regarding software; Dispart, naming, activating, etc etc. Internet info is spotty and hard to find, as most people clone whole drives as opposed to boot partitions. Then there is that 100mb hidden partition...