Migrated OS to SSD closed discussion.

[vhick]

thank you very much. I'm downloading right now. I gonna test it later.

[RayZZor]

Do you have a 2-3 years old notebook (Windows Vista, dual core processor, HDD) having only one bay for an internal disk? In this case you may have wondered whether you should buy a new, up-to-date notebook (Windows7, maybe Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processor) having a SSD, or if you can upgrade the old one by exchanging the HDD by a SSD.
This was my situation some weeks ago. My guess was that the upgrade would allow to keep my old notebook (ASUS V1S) for at least another year without beeing annoyed by its relatively low performance.
The main hurdle for the upgrade (beside the costs of the SSD) was the migration of the system partition from the HDD to the new SSD. I bought the SSD (OCZ Vertex2) without being sure about the best option for the migration. At this time, I was not aware of "Paragon Migrate OS to SSD" and I was frightened by the risk I have to take when using some "hacker tools" (like Clonezilla) to do the job.
Before starting the migration, I mounted the SSD in an eSATA housing and connected it to my notebook. Since still being unsure about the software to use, I searched again for an alternative to Clonezilla. I was happy to find the professional, user friendly Paragon Windows software and immediately decided to perform the migration with this tool.
To my surprise, the migration was perfectly smooth and quite fast. There are only a few minor issues that should be improved (e.g. the manual, the progress indication etc.), but nothing really serious.
So far, I observed no problems with the OS (Windows Vista Business 32bit), Windows Office (Outlook, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint) or any of my other applications. The speed of the SSD is impressive: The boot time is approximalely divided by two; PDF documents are displayed almost immediately; all applications are starting and reacting much faster.
My recommendation: "Paragon Migrate OS to SSD" should be supplied with any SSD sold to end users.

[handzel]

Paragon Migrate OS to SSD. The program works well only problem is the lack of their own choice on the destination disk partition.

[Paragon_MA]

Originally Posted by handzel

Paragon Migrate OS to SSD. The program works well only problem is the lack of their own choice on the destination disk partition.

Thank you for feedback. This tool is mainly designed for users who want to migrate their OS to SSD drive. In future for different products we will implement all the requested features. But sure the product will have different name and goal.

[Paragon_MA]

Many thanks for your feedback.

[Paragon_MA]

Originally Posted by vhick

thank you very much. I'm downloading right now. I gonna test it later.

You are always welcome

[dfan]

I am unable to complete the installation. The file referred to in the error message is Paragon's installer .msi

http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/8792/installh.png
(error message screencap)

Please help me get a working version of this program since I need to move my OS!

[Cudni]

in case the original upload was corrupted, download again and retry. What AV is in use?

[dfan]

I'll try re-DL.

Avira (no warnings from AV)

[dfan]

That got it!

The original DL must have gotten corrupted...

[dfan]

The migration went smoothly but for the "time remaining" counter which started at 1 second and got to about 7 seconds before I ignored it entirely.

Better to start at an arbitrary number (1min/GB?) and count down

Otherwise smooth as could be!

[Paragon_MA]

Originally Posted by dfan

The migration went smoothly but for the "time remaining" counter which started at 1 second and got to about 7 seconds before I ignored it entirely.

Better to start at an arbitrary number (1min/GB?) and count down

Otherwise smooth as could be!

This is a known bug and we are going to fix it.
Thank you for your report.

[Paragon_MA]

Originally Posted by Lacko50

Configuration 1:
Intel i7 quad, 2.6 GHz, 6 GB RAM, Windows 7 64-bit (US English).
Source hard disks: internal 750 GB 4-disk RAID5 with dedicated controller (Promise)
Destination: internal 32 GB IDE OCZ SSD

I bought a new SSD, explicitly for testing this Migrate OS to SSD SW. It was never used before, but worked perfectly: I could read and write data there. So I went ahead with testing the new Paragon SW.

After the welcome screen I received a warning message, that the destination disk will lose all its data. I clicked on Next.

The SW started to analyze my system, and automatically selected the destination drive (there was just one drive other than the boot disk) and told me that there was not enough space on the target for everything (360 GB data) on my source drive.

I then chose to select which directories to copy in the next "Change copy options" window. I selected only the Windows directory, 19.6GB, because I wanted to migrate the OS to the new disk, not other programs or data.

It would also be useful to get a button for going back a screen, but the SW has none.

I have hundreds of directories, which have to be manually deselected. It is quite a tedious task, which could be improved with buttons for "select all", "deselect all", and allowing Shift click to de/select a series of directories/files from the highlighted one to the directory under the cursor.

The next window tells that the SW is "Calculating copy size..."

Unfortunately, the Migrate OS to SSD program hangs there. It only shows rotating tear drops, but does not finish in 4 hours. I tried with unformatted destination disk and formatted one, with the same result.

Then I tried to close the program, but it only told that it was not safe to close, and it would close as soon as possible. It continued to show the rotating tear drops, but never quit. At least not in another couple hours. I had to shut it down from the Task Manger, which told me that part of the Paragon SW is not responding, but finally killed it.


Then I tried another system

Configuration 2:
Intel Core 2 duo, 3 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Windows 7 64-bit.
Source hard disks: internal 150 GB SATA
Destination: internal 1.5 TB SATA

Again, I only wanted to move the Windows directory to the new disk. Everything repeated as in Configuration 1: the Migrate OS to SSD program hanged at Calculating copy size... I had to use Task manager the kill the not responding SW.

Thank you for your report.
Could you please tell us if you do not exclude files in second case (copy to 1.5TB drive) does it hang the same way like in first case?

[Lacko50]

> tell us if you do not exclude files in second case (copy to 1.5TB drive)
As I wrote "I only wanted to move the Windows directory to the new disk", that is, I deselected everything, only the Windows directory remained. It means 25GB selected of the 100GB used space on the 150GB boot disk.

> does it hang the same way like in first case?
Yes. It shows that the crash was not caused by the destination drive, but by the file selection process.

[Paragon_MA]

Originally Posted by Lacko50

> tell us if you do not exclude files in second case (copy to 1.5TB drive)
As I wrote "I only wanted to move the Windows directory to the new disk", that is, I deselected everything, only the Windows directory remained. It means 25GB selected of the 100GB used space on the 150GB boot disk.

> does it hang the same way like in first case?
Yes. It shows that the crash was not caused by the destination drive, but by the file selection process.

thank you for update. All the information has been forwarded to our developers. The process of exclude is being worked with currently. We are researching possible ways of improvement.

[Lacko50]

When you get an (even experimental) fix, please send it to me. I'd give it a try.

[Paragon_MA]

Originally Posted by Lacko50

When you get an (even experimental) fix, please send it to me. I'd give it a try.

Will do for sure.

[Oxford_Al]

Hi
I would like to post the log files created by this program but I have searched my C: drive and nothing has been created. Is this because I killed the program during the never ending "calculating size" step?
Perhaps something could be provided in the instructions about to how to move just the OS onto a clean drive and maybe a "de-select all" option so that the task of unselceting all the unnecessary folders can be speeded up.
I will have another attempt at this but if I run into the same problem it might also be my last attempt.
Thanks
Al

[Maeghas]

I also had problems during the Calculating step but I let it run overnight and it did eventually get to the Migration stage. However, that is as far as I got. The program seems not to go any farther. Note: I am running 64-bit Windows. Please see my posts under Questions For Early Adopters regarding my efforts.

If there are any files created during the process, you will find them in the Migrate OS to SSD program file structure (usually in Program Files (x86) on the system drive). I don't know if any of the necessary files are created if you cannot get past the Calculating stage, but there are files available if you can get past it.

Note: fdisk.log is much too large to upload to this forum. But the others, if you can locate them, should be within the limits.

[Maeghas]

Please remember this isn't even a Beta test. You can't be impatient with an Alpha-type program and give it thumbs down just because it didn't work one or two times. From the posts I've seen in this sub-thread you would think the reviewers had put down big money for the program.

The purpose of the Early Adopter test is to get constructive feedback. The attitude of "I can't spend any more time on this, sorry" is just not thorough testing philosophy. I won't be able to test this program any more than I already have at the moment, but I await an improved version to see if anything gets worked out.

[mwarnerii]

I had the same problem. I think it has to do with how many files are in the partition you pick as the source partition. It seems to me that it did not matter how many files I select from the partition. My Windows XP partitions had over 60,000 files each. I then converted my virtual images of Windows into real partitions. I ended up performing a clean install of Windows XP to get a Windows partition that I can use as the source without waiting for an eternity.

[Phitar]

I'm having the same problem. I get a zip file that contains xml. Tried this on two pc's and get the same thing.

[Paragon_MA]

Originally Posted by Maeghas

Please remember this isn't even a Beta test. You can't be impatient with an Alpha-type program and give it thumbs down just because it didn't work one or two times. From the posts I've seen in this sub-thread you would think the reviewers had put down big money for the program.

The purpose of the Early Adopter test is to get constructive feedback. The attitude of "I can't spend any more time on this, sorry" is just not thorough testing philosophy. I won't be able to test this program any more than I already have at the moment, but I await an improved version to see if anything gets worked out.

Thank you for your feedback. We are working over the file and folder exclude problem at the moment and going to fix all the problem we met in this early adopter program.

[Paragon_MA]

Originally Posted by dmtulsa

70 GB to migrate

OK, Last night I wiped out the SSD and started over. This time I started the program and selected what to migrate. When it got to the "Calculating Copy Size" Screen I went to bed after a couple hours. This morning it said it was going to migrate 70gb and I need to restart my computer. I restarted and it went to a Paragon DOS like screen. After an hour I went to work. Maybe it will be done by the time I get home today.

I understand this is beta software but it needs to work much much faster. When I did a full copy it took only 18 minutes

I'll report on the status as I can
Thank you
Doug

Sorry for the inconveniences it caused to you. The fact that system asked for restart indicates that there were locked files on SSD drive or your OS had stopped VSS service.
To get the clear result it would be nice to delete all partitions on SSD, check via Windows services if Microsoft VSS service is started and run the migration.
This way it must work (even if calculation takes longer).

[Paragon_MA]

Originally Posted by Oxford_Al

Hi
I would like to post the log files created by this program but I have searched my C: drive and nothing has been created. Is this because I killed the program during the never ending "calculating size" step?
Perhaps something could be provided in the instructions about to how to move just the OS onto a clean drive and maybe a "de-select all" option so that the task of unselceting all the unnecessary folders can be speeded up.
I will have another attempt at this but if I run into the same problem it might also be my last attempt.
Thanks
Al

Oxford_Al, we are considering the way to disable exclude of system folders that should shorten the calculation time and ensure the user that OS will be migrated properly.