Using Image to migrate to SSD

I am thinking of upgrading to SSD and looked at Samsung Evo Pro. Running the OS plus programs only on SSD and keeping data on a separate drive, I wonder if I should go for 120 gb or perhaps 256 gb. My current operating drive is 300gb, so I am wondering if going via an image is possible or do I need to do a fresh install?
I am using Shadow Protect and I think they have problems shrinking an image but I also own Image for Windows. My current compressed (standard) shadow protect image is about 50gb (as it contains not only Win7, Office and the usual programs but also a Raxco Recovery Snapshot).

How would I best go about this?

 

beethoven,

The choice of SSD size depends on how careful you are with separating data files from OS files. For example, no video, documents, pictures, downloads, music, etc in the OS partition. I could cope with a 40 GB SSD.

How much used and free space is in your OS partition? What can be removed from the OS partition? Do you use hibernation? If not, is hibernation turned on? Do you use Windows Restore Points?

 

beethoven,

Can you post a screenshot of Disk Management showing the partition rectangles and the Capacity and Free Space columns.

Laptop or Desktop? I assume Desktop.

 

Brian, I am using a desktop as you already guessed and attach a screenshot of the disk management. On the C:drive I only use the OS and program files plus desktop, downloads and my documents. The last three are all for temporary use or backed up to other drives. My email program also saves the data on the OS drive otherwise I try to avoid adding anything. I have not touched hibernation and checking on it, it is set to balanced (default). I am not particularly fuzzed about it either way. I currently set it to 10 Minutes to turn off the screen and 5 hours to hibernate which hardly every happens. Restore has been turned off. According to properties used space is 76.1 gb and free space is 221 gb. As mentioned above I am running Raxco Instant Recovery and this means a snapshot is stored on the OS - I guess that's one reason 40 gb won't do for me.

 

beethoven,

You might feel happier with a 256 GB SSD rather than 128 GB. 76 GB of used space is a fair bit on a 128 GB drive. Not much space for future installs and upgrades. But if you disabled Hibernation and Windows System Restore you could gain another 10 GB or more of Free Space. It's up to you. Remember, a 128 GB SSD or HD only shows as 119.2 GiB in your computer. Your used space is currently 76.1 GiB and you should never exceed 90% used space with a SSD even though there is probably about 10% over-provisioning.

To transfer Win7 to the SSD is easy. You could do it with an IFW Copy or IFW image and IFL Restore. Before either procedure I'd boot IFL and use "Compact" to compact the Win7 data to 100 GB. This ensures all sectors in use will be in the first 100 GB of the partition and will fit in your SSD partition. Basically, that's it. Let me know closer to the procedure and I'll outline the Options needed for the procedure.

Which email program do you use? I use Outlook and the email .pst is in the D: drive. I also use Portable Thunderbird in the D: drive. Just wondering if your email files have to be in the C: drive.

I use this method to move User files to the D: drive...

http://www.starkeith.net/coredump/2009/05/18/how-to-move-your-windows-user-profile-to-another-drive/

Basically, you bring up the relevant Location tab and change the C to a D. Click OK. Easy. I do it for Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures and Video

 

Also consider using Samsung's Migration software.

 

taotoo,

Samsung may have improved their app but I saw a few disasters last year.

http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Ghost/Missing-C-in-ghost-after-disk-update/td-p/965639

 

I just mentioned it because I successfully used it (albeit only once!) a year or so back. It managed to move my C and D partition (I think) from my old HD to a new Samsung SSD. The only thing I remember is that it didn't copy shadow copies, but other than that the whole thing was very quick and easy. I imagine my original C and D partitions where larger than the destination partitions, though obviously the latter where large enough to accommodate all the transferred data.

 

Brian, thanks again - I guess I will give the 256 gb a test, so that I don't run out of space immediately. As for my email program, my prime program is The Bat and all the data for this is already stored on the second internal harddrive, so there should be no issue once I properly link the program to the database. I also use the "old" Opera with integrated email program but I know how to backup that database and could re-import again if necessary. So it seems the only thing I am uncertain about is the slighly smaller drive size and need to compact or shrink. Once I get my new SSD, I may have more questions

 

A 256 GB SSD is "safe". You won't run out of space.

You can check the sector spread on your 298 GiB partition with IFW. Choose Backup, highlight the partition and click Information. The "MiB to Restore" is the sector spread. If it is greater than 240,000 then you will need to Compact the sectors. Click Compact and enter (say) 200000. Compaction can't be done from IFW as the partition is online. Do it from IFL.

In Information, what are the LBA numbers for that partition?

 

MIB used 77909
MIB free 227334
MIB to Restore 169697
LBA 2048-625139711

At the moment I don't actually have Ifw installed on this PC as I use Shadow Protect there. Will I be able to use IfL to compact and then use Shadowprotect to image once more and to revover the last image or should I do a new image with IfW (after installing the software?)

 

MIB to Restore 169697. You don't have to Compact at all as the sectors will fit on a 256 GB SSD.

You don't need to install IFW if you don't want to. You could image/restore or copy with IFL. ShadowProtect will probably work too but I don't know how it handles restoring to smaller partitions even if the sectors will fit.

The LBA numbers indicate 1MiB alignment which is needed for a SSD. That's fine.

 

Thank you Brian - will compacting have any other advantage? If using Shadowprotect I think I will need to do a compacting first as they can only reduce the size a bit and then it vary much depends on how the data is spread around the drive. If doing it via IfL - don't know if compacting has other advantages.

 

For you, Compacting has no advantages.

Maybe ShadowProtect will work better if you resized the Win7 partition to 200,000 MiB. Then there wouldn't be a "smaller target partition" issue.

 

Just some partition comments. I have a test Win8 partition, 20000 MiB.

11356 MiB Used
19482 MiB to Restore

Disk Management can Shrink this partition to 18500 MiB. There must be an immovable sector at that point.
BIBM can Resize this partition to 11356 MiB.
The data in the 20000 MiB partition can be Compacted to 11356 MiB. The partition size remains 20000 MiB.

Make sense?

 

yes, i think I understand this now - based on the above I could easily shrink the partition to fit a 256 gb SSD. I guess the 90% rule you mentioned earlier relates to used space only. Are there any "dangers" I should be aware of when shrinking my drive?

 

beethoven,

Mostly, resizing is safe. I've never seen an issue. You always get a warning about having a backup but that's standard. Your resizing will be fast because no data needs to be moved.

A 256 GB SSD has 238.4 GiB of space. For Over-Provisioning, never have less than 24 GiB of unused space. The space can be inside or outside a partition. So a 214 GiB partition, 100% full is OK. A 238 GiB partition that is 90% full is OK. Practically, you will never have that much data on the SSD but it's good to know the rules.

My 240 GB SSD has 14 primary partitions and is only a third filled with data. I'll never reach 90%.

 

When I migrated to 256GB SSD from my old 750GB HD, I used Macrium Reflect Free edition to first backup the OS on the old drive..
Then I restored the image to the new SSD drive, and everything went and works smoothly.
In general Crucial SSD's are the cheapest, and also one of the best..

 

ok, I am ready now to get started with BIBM and will install the software on my pc to resize my drive - I have actually changed the harddrive to do some other testing first, so my config details are different from before (unless I swap back to the original hd). The new hd has 1 tb space, used space is basically unchanged. My idea now is to install BIBM, install it in its own partion, then resize the c drive. Once I get my SSD this coming week, I want to migrate the OS to the new SSD and assuming everything else works, reconfigure the new 1 TB harddrive to be my internal backup/data drive.
As for BIBM to be on the new SSD in the future, can this be done via restoring an image or should I go through the installation process again once the SSD is up and running?

 

Installation of BIBM went well and the Boot Manager was set up as planned. However, I have now run into trouble - not yet sure if this is due to running BIBM in conjunction with Instant Recovery by Raxco. Once I booted up again via the bootmanager into my win7 environment and enabled Instant Recover, the system becomes unbootable. At first I thought the two boot managers clash and the system freezes. I then tried a different mouse and this allowed me to continue booting. This is a bit concerning as I don't want to get stuck at this point with no way to go back or forward. I will try to see if I can determine for sure what the issue is.

While I was keen on using BIBM for the migration to the SSD, I don't think I will need it to be installed in the long run. On the other hand, I would still like to keep Instant Recovery working though it does not have to be enabled in the short term until the migration has been completed.

 

H

Hi Brian,
Once upon a time I had to shrink a 160GB with about 44GB of data (C: partition) on an HDD to fit onto a 60GB SSD.
I made an image of the HDD first just to be safe.
The first attempt using Shrink wasn't enough so I thought that I'd try again to see what happened and it got smaller, but still not enough.
On the third attempt it would have been possible to go below the 60GB so I changed the size to suit my needs and everything was fine.
So I didn't need BIBM. (What is BIBM? I googled and didn't find anything about a program to resize partitions...? OK, found it by searching Wilders -> BootItBareMetal by Terabytesoftware costs $39.95, a bit much when two extra Shrinks will do.)

I then used Shadow Protect to create my image and restore it to the SSD. This was W7-64bit Pro.
J

 

beethoven,

You don't need BIBM installed. Do everything from the boot disk. Even after the SSD is up and running you don't need BIBM installed unless you are multi-booting or making frequent partition changes.

 

I'm about to do the same migration. Can I accomplish this move only using Image for DOS?

I have BIBM and Image for DOS. Is Image for Linux more capable than IFD?

 

I have now removed BIBM but fwiw, I am impressed by the program and how well installation and uninstall worked, the documentation in the pdf file and the video tutorials are great. According to my testing there was no issue with Instant Recovery after all - IR came up once I went into Win 7 via the BIBM console still giving me the options. The freezing mentioned earlier was due to some mouse issue, instead of switching the mouse I probably could have also changed something in the bios as explained in the instruction manual but it did not matter much once I understand what was going on. I only uninstalled the program, since I am not going to make many changes and don't really need a multi-boot environment, so using the boot disk when necessary will be sufficient for me. My partition is now set up fine for the migration, so I am waiting for my SSD drive in the mail

 

Well I shrunk the 500GB partition to the same size as the SSD and did a copy and paste using BIBM however the alignment is off.

How do I use BIBM to get the correct alignment?