Will be upgrading soon to a new computer Thinkpad T450s laptop that has default 500 gb hdd. Will be replacing hdd with larger hdd for data and an m.2 256 gb ssd for boot drive. Since I am not sure if the Lenovo recovery disk will give me a choice as to where I can install Windows, I want to have a secondary plan using Macrium 6 boot USB. I want to use Macrium to image the original 500 gb hdd which I think will have 3 partitions. Then upgrade hdd and m.2 256 gb ssd. At that point I want to restore the image to the smalled ssd. Cloning not a good option for me. 1. Will the restore automatically align for ssd? 2. Will the partitions automatically adjust for the smaller sized ssd? Thanks for your help as always.
huntnyc, I assume the OS is Win8.1 64-bit installed in UEFI mode. It will have a minimum of 4 partitions and probably 5 or 6. Often you can delete the extra OEM partitions but not always. Post a screenshot of Disk Management when the computer arrives. The Microsoft Reserved Partition doesn't appear in Disk Management but that doesn't matter. GPT is forgiving in that you can restore the partitions in any order and resized if you desire but you need to update the EFI System Partition to let it know about the partitions.
My Lenovo T450s laptop just arrived a couple of days ago. Attached is a screenshot of the Windows 7 64 Pro setup conataining the 500 GB system drive with a System reserved partition, a Recovery partition and a separate 16 GB cache drive to help speed boot. Partition style of C drive is Master Boot Record (MBR). I want to transfer the system drive to a 256 GB m.2 SSD which I will install soon. I could just use the Lenovo recovery USB I made but then I would have to open the system up twice, leaving my new HDD for data out the first time so the recovery USB will only see the SSD. Fopr imaging I might be more comfortable using my Image for Linux USB. If I decide to image, I will need to do a lot of prep I believe such as deleting the recovery partition, resizing the system drive to around 150 GB to be safe, uninstalling Express cache proram and wiping 16GB SSD to have no conflicts there since I will use this for pagefile anyway, making sure defrag scheduling and system restore are turned off for C drive. There may be other things for me to do but these are some I know of. Then, make the image with IFL 2.93 of the whole disk, install m.2 ssd and blank HDD for data, restore disk image to SSD with IFL, gussing I need to set alignment to 2048. And then, hopefully it will boot Windows 7 Pro. What do you think of this? Am I missing something and do you believe this is feasable? Also, do you think I would manually have to invoke TRIM after restoring and thanks for all help. Gary
huntnyc, I haven't worked with a SSD/HD cache setup so I can't help with that aspect. You seem on top of those details. Do you have BIBM? I ask because sometimes the OS doesn't boot after you delete the Recovery partition. So if you delete the partition with BIBM (don't select Clear Boot Sector) and the OS doesn't boot, you can Undelete the partition with BIBM. I agree with your image/restore approach but I'd use the latest version of IFL. When making the boot disk (use the Custom mode) select Align Partitions on 1MiB Boundaries. Create an Entire Drive image. When restoring, do an Entire Drive restore with these Options... Scale to Fit Align to Target Log Results to File Check TRIM is enabled by using this line from an Admin Command prompt... fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify ... the answer should be 0 if TRIM is enabled. If you don't see 0 then use... fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0 Questions?
Brian, Thanks much as always. I feel like I might be taking too many steps and have to make to many assumptions and if one of them for some reason does not come to pass, then I might get stuck. I may just open up the machine twice and start by letting Lenovo's recovery be restored to the SSD using their script. Then, deal with deleting the 16 GB cache drive and uninstalling the program that manage that part. I do have BIBM but I believe I might have to go for the safer route for me for now. Thanks again though because as always this was so informative. Gary
Gary, I'd probably do the same thing as that 16 GB cache drive worries me. I don't understand its setup.
Yes, the Cache SSD is a separate m.2 drive that is used to make Windows 7 boot faster by caching files. The prorgram that manages this is called Expresscache. Hopefully, after recovering to the new SSD, I can uninstall this program and then delete the partitions on the 16 GB cache drive and then create a partition to move a pagefile and some other stuff there. Thanks much again. Things are getting a bit too complex for me I think with technology. Gary
