Tricky migration, would like some advice.

Discussion in 'Other Paragon Disk Utilities' started by Nofew, Feb 16, 2013.

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  1. Nofew

    Nofew Registered Member

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    Location:
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    I have a laptop that has space for two hard drives. Currently both drives are in use and set up with RAID 0. My goal is to migrate over to one SSD and one HDD. Here's my plan:

    First, image the drives over to an external drive through Linux (dd if=/dev/sda conv=sync,noerror of=/mnt/sdb1/blah.raw) to make it into one single sane file rather than two striped drives.

    Next, take both hard drives out (each being about 500 gigabytes) and replace them with one 256 GB SSD and one 2 TB HDD.

    After that, image the file /back/ to the 2 TB drive through Linux.

    Finally, boot off that drive, and run Paragon's utility to copy stuff over to the SSD, handle realigning sectors, etc.

    There's one hitch with this: I don't know if windows will actually boot off the 2TB drive after being cloned. Will it work at all? Would I just need to re-activate, or would I be stuck?

    The installation on this laptop uses an OEM key, so I can't just use a regular install disc. I "sort of" have a recovery disk, but I don't know it'll actually work. Besides that, it would just be easier if I could keep most of my programs in place.

    Any advice, suggestions and hugs would be appreciated.
     
  2. Paragon_JT

    Paragon_JT Paragon Moderator

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    Location:
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    Hi Nofew,

    For this task, consider Hard Disk Manager 12.

    HDM will see the RAID 0 as a single drive.

    Using HDM you'll create an image of your RAID 0 to an external hdd, then restore the full image to the 2TB drive, exactly as you outlined.

    Windows XP and later can boot from 2TB drives so that won't be an issue. If the drive is larger than 2TB, other factors will come into consideration.

    The OEM license could play into your success, but the only change to the system would be the hdd, which shouldn't trigger an activation prompt.

    Once you've booted from the 2TB drive, you can use the Migrate to SSD option in HDM to move the OS, programs, and any desired files to the SSD.

    Once your migration to the SSD has completed, power down, remove the 2TB hdd, and boot the laptop from the SSD.

    After successfully booting to the SSD, shut down, reattach the 2TB drive, and boot to the HDM recovery media to remove the Active flag from the boot partition on the 2TB drive. Restart the laptop once this has completed.

    The system is then reconfigured to use both drives as you've outlined, though you may need to change the drive letter on the 2TB hdd to your preference.

    Wishing you a successful migration - Please let us know how it works out for you.
     
  3. Nofew

    Nofew Registered Member

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    Good news! Things went fine and everything's working like it's supposed to!

    I did it a bit differently than you said, mostly because I forgot to check the forum before starting the procedure. I ended up paying an extra $20 since I purchased "Migrate OS to SSD" separately from HDM, but it worked out fine in the end. Story below.


    So, it turns out that the 2TB drive I was looking at couldn't actually physically fit in my laptop. My bays are 9 mm deep and the HDD's in question needed 15 mm. The problem was the same with 1.5 TB drives.

    As a result I grabbed a 1 TB drive instead. I also ordered one of those external hard drive docks and then used Linux to clone my RAID array over to the new drive.

    It didn't fit. Luckily, I actually prepare for this very circumstance with almost all of my hard drives. I had shrunk the partitions down a little when I first got the system so I could afford to crop the end off. On top of that, I had 128 gigs of "free" space since I was planning on reinstalling the second OS I had anyway from scratch.

    Once the data I needed was copied over I took both 500 gig hard drives out of my laptop and replaced them with the SDD and 1 TB HDD. Windows booted just fine off the new hard drive without any issues. I didn't have to mess with anything; I just turned the laptop on like usual and it started up fine. (On another note, It took about ten minutes to enter a usable state since I was only running off of that one hard drive at 5,400 RPM. My gosh, 7,200 RPM RAID 0 is flat-out amazing. That takes perhaps four or five minutes to become usable. I know five minutes doesn't sound like a lot, but once you've experienced the difference you'll wonder how you went so long without it!)

    I had previously installed Paragon's Migrate OS to HDD software so I just launched that. The operation went smoothly. In about an hour or two I had everything I needed copied over. I rebooted, changed the priority of the hard drives in the BIOS and everything appeared just fine.

    When I went to shrink the partition I noticed a problem: The MFT was moved over too far to the right, so I couldn't shrink more than about 80 megabytes. I had to purchase Paragon HDM to fix it, but I have no quails about it! The ability to read non-NTFS filesystems (especially ext!) within Windows is almost priceless to me!

    Once HDM fixed things up I installed my second OS just fine. Since then, Windows boots up and enters a usable state in about twenty seconds, and Linux takes about fifteen, give or take two seconds. That's including the time it takes to load KDE.

    A few weeks later I asked myself why I have services set to "delayed start" in Windows. I mean, I'm running off an SSD, surely I can load everything at once at boot. I changed them all to "automatic", and now there's a problem: Whenever Windows boots it takes about a minute and 40 seconds (100 seconds, interesting number..) before Explorer lets me do anything. I can't use the icons down by the clock, all of them appear frozen, programs don't start, and UAC prompts don't appear. If I try to run an administrative program from the Start Menu the Menu gets stuck on-screen unless I summon the Task Manager (but even then, if I bring the Menu back it just stays hung) or until 100 seconds go by, at which point the UAC prompt appears minimized and the Start Menu fixes its self. This isn't anything Paragon did though.

    If anyone has any advice on how to fix that (I didn't keep notes on what was set to Delayed Start before), maybe some event log somewhere that says when I changed stuff and what I changed it to, that'd be appreciated. Apart from that though, everything's great!
     
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