Hi guys,
 
I recently picked up a Vertex 3 SSD (120GB) and I want to know how to 'clone' my drive without re-installing everything. I was originally going to re install everything from scratch, but I don't have the time and I have everything setup just the way I want it :P I have been hearing about the program "Acronis", which works well according to many.
 
Can anyone point me to a guide or provide a detailed explanation/share their experience? I currently have my 1TB WD Caviar Blue hooked up to SATA3. I plugged in the new drive to update the firmware, but it was already updated to 2.15 (yay!). It shows up in Device Manager and in the MB BIOS, but not in My Computer. Is that normal? I remember having this issue a while back with another drive. I plan to remove some games to shrink it to about 100GB so I can clone it without problems.
 
Thanks guys! 
 

If you have access to a external hard disk, you can backup your current installation of Windows 7 as a Windows 7 System Image and restore it on to the new disk:  How to guide
 
It may work just fine, I never had any luck with W7 back-ups, but that is most likely just me.
 
Some people swear by Acronis True Image to do to the same thing.
 
I use Norton Ghost for some of the other features it has that are really nice.
A new hard drive not showing up is normal, you will have to go into the W7 disk manager, initialize it as a simple volume, and then format it.  It should show up ok then.

I use the Windows 7 image backup just fine.  You do need to make a recovery disk (CD) when asked after the image making is complete.  As to the settings for the SSD, no to IDE, AHCI or I think RAID is OK. 
IMO you need to go to the OCZ website / forums and see if there is a sticky for initializing the SSD.  I personally would do this before making it the C: drive... I would try moving the SSD to the SATA port where the currend HDD "C" drive is.  I would also leave the current "C:" disconnected until the restore Image is complete. 
If others do not agree, step in . 

Download Acronis WD edition from western digital.com
It also comes on the disk that was with your Caviar Blue.

Does this work if I am cloning from a WD drive? Also, will the drive be aligned for SSD? 

At the bottom end of the OCZ site there is a reference to using the Acronis True Image software to clone the OS to the new SSD.
 

Acronis True Image is a great tool that allows you adjust partition sizes before the clone starts. Cloning copies the contents of your drive to another drive in the event you wish to migrate your existing data/OS rather than do a fresh OS install. Many times, the contents of the first disk are written to an image file as an intermediate step. This image file can be saved for future restoration of your data.

 
(Source).
 
Since you are migrating from a Western Digital drive to your SSD you can use the tool that they provide to do this. It's fairly easy and worth the extra bit of time to install it. Using the Windows 7 backup and restore is also a viable option to do this but you'll have to take some other steps to get that done properly. There is also an alternative method using a USB boot drive to utilize an application to clone the drives directly but I doubt it would align it properly for the SSD.
 
Since you would be cloning an already built OS I would think that the cloning software would be adequate for the process. I would, however, suggest that you at least boot using your normal OS drive and quick format/align the SSD before your cloning process to make sure the drive firmware is properly aligned before the cloning process. I haven't cloned to an SSD yet (I will be doing so on Thursday when mine arrives) but it should be a fairly straight forward process provided you follow their suggested procedures.
 
OCZ has a basic guide to SSD's which covers most things you'll want to consider, even the firmware updates. This is located here.

Thank you for your replies.
I will give Acronis a shot. I am cloning from a WD drive, so I got the software from WD's site.
 
I have already installed the SSD and it is recognized in the BIOS and Windows. I formatted it, so it is usable. Is that what you mean by aligning?
 
Is there a guide you can reference or provide some steps for the process? I'm quite new to this :)
 
Thanks again!

ARchamps

I have already installed the SSD and it is recognized in the BIOS and Windows. I formatted it, so it is usable. Is that what you mean by aligning?

 
If you used Vista/Windows 7 for the quick format of the SSD then you are already aligned for the drive. Those versions of the OS properly align SSD's to the block sizes needed. When you are finished cloning the OS it is recommended to run the Windows Experience Index function so that it will recognize the SSD properly, set the appropriate services so they don't run defrag on your SSD and will set the OS to utilize TRIM for garbage collection. Please do not ever defrag the SSD as that will shorten the lifespan of the device. Use only minimal amounts of bench testing as well because of the read/writes will also shorten the lifespan. These warnings are covered in that ABC's link in my previous posting. Read that thoroughly and it will explain quite a number of things that I haven't covered here already. Have fun with you SSD, I surely will.

Thank you for your help! I'll keep my progress posted here. I will post if I have any troubles and hopefully you guys can help :) If you don't mind, can you let me know how it works for you? Maybe a general step-by-step?
 
Thanks again.

ARchamps


Thank you for your help! I'll keep my progress posted here. I will post if I have any troubles and hopefully you guys can help :) If you don't mind, can you let me know how it works for you? Maybe a general step-by-step?

Thanks again.

 
I'll be happy to post my findings here once I have done that procedure. I'm going to do exactly what I have recommended and I'll post the 'howto' in a thread in this section.

I used to use Acronis to transfer my image to another drive.  But now I have a WHS that backs up my systems and formats new drives, if I need it.  Both are very user friendly. 

Thanks! I'm going to be home in a few hours so I will give it a try. Question though... if the SSD alignment is off, can it be fixed?

ARchamps


Thanks! I'm going to be home in a few hours so I will give it a try. Question though... if the SSD alignment is off, can it be fixed?

 
When you have quick formatted the drive the alignment is automatically adjusted properly using Windows 7. If you have done this using XP then you'll have to re-quick format and adjust the alignment manually. Once that is done you lose the OS and have to re-clone the drive.
 
[edit]
If you need to quick format using XP there is an article by OCZ that explains what you would need to do in order to get it done properly and how to align the drive. This article is located here. It basically uses a Windows Vista/7 recovery disk, of which you can get easily, to align the SSD for use on XP. Alignment just means that it sets up an offset alignment of 1024KiB (2048 sectors) instead of the standard 64KiB (128 sectors) for the drive partition. Since they recommend the 1024KiB alignment this would need to be done for efficiency on the SSD. The article is well explained and informative.
[/edit]

Thanks scaryone! I owe you a beer

ARchamps


Thanks scaryone! I owe you a beer

 
Thanks for the thought but I don't drink alcohol. You're welcome to have an additional one in my honor if you would like.

Success! How does my bench look?
 

 
Super fast! I need to re-connect my old one.. I just want to make sure this one is stable. Thanks again! It was so easy! 

Looks fairly decent. I'm in process of cloning my OS drive right now. Glad to see that you're doing fine.
 
[edit]
It's definitely an improvement over normal platter drives. Just remember that you don't need an excessive swap space on the SSD's. I removed the normal drive swap space and just set a 1000-2000mb space on the SSD for swap. Works just fine.
[/edit]

I was trying to use ghost 15.0 for this but said my destination drive was too small when it wasn't. Physically it was smaller than my primary drive but I had reduced the data down to a size that would have fit. Now trying the Win 7 option.

I do think I have screwed up this win 7 image process though. I imaged to the new SSD. But I think I wasn't supposed to do that. Cause now when I try to recover the image (basically I am cloning my old system hard drive), it won't put it on my new SSD cause it is full of the image, right? I needed to put the image somewhere else, like on an external hd? Hopefully this makes sense.

If you are making a backup image of the OS you will need for it to be placed elsewhere. You won't be able to do that on the drive it hosts the OS on as you'll be adding to the overall space utilization while you are imaging it.
 
Best practice is to choose another drive with more space than the overall size of the used space for the drive you are imaging. This will require at least two hard drives (the OS drive and the image backup drive) in order to properly image the boot drive.

Ok, got around the ghost issue not being able to copy (reduced partition size on old drive). Got it to copy over to the new SSD. Shutdown, removed old hard drive. Booted up to a "bootmgr is missing". Wonde why it won't accept the new drive as the "old one". I selected the OS option and MBR option when I copied in ghost. Any ideas?

there's also a program called EZ Gig. you can clone drive.

I gave up on the win 7 backup cause when I put the image on my esata drive and then tried to restore to my SSD it would not let me. Got the "disk is set as active" error. It saw the SSD but wouldn't let me restore to it. I very much want to avoid a reinstall of win 7, but it is looking more likely.

I would suggest not using the basic windows 7 backup/restore for this then. There are complications that you are running into perhaps. Use the Acronis True Image backup utility from the WD site. It's free to use and doesn't require a Western Digital drive to backup/restore the image from. I used it for my migration from regular platter hard drive to SSD without any issues at all. It's fairly straightforward and you can clone the boot drive to the SSD while it's hooked up and not the primary drive. Then just disconnect the original boot drive and use the SSD as the boot device keeping the older drive as backup just in case issues happen.
 
You may need to secure erase or just reformat the SSD as blank prior to doing the cloning but usually that is not the case.

Alright. I'll give it a shot.

Any weird options to pick in acronis before I clone/copy the old hard drive?

ringerthrawn


Alright. I'll give it a shot.

 
You can download the software from here.

I did and installed it. Processing the image now. Will have to go I work, come back as check it. Weird, just aske for a reboot in the middle of the process.

Anything in particular needed after it completes? Like reassigning drive letters or anything?

None.  Your drive letters will remain the same given that you're using the same number of drives beforehand (if you boot with the old and new drives attached, you'll get one or more additional drive letters depending on the number of partitions).  If your hard drive is IDE based, be sure to set the jumper accordingly (Primary).  Then, confirm in the BIOS that your new HDD is set to the primary boot device.
 
As per your question, it should not reboot in the middle of the process.  When the process finishes, it will tell you whether or not it completed successfully.

dont format the drive for 1st time by urself let windows installation run to step to than formate it again and clone
 
some drives like to adress the sectors by themselves for first time