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Comments for Want to use a ssd drive as boot drive." Average Rating Click here to add your own comments

Oct 10, 2011 Rating section 2 by: Support If it does boot go in to the Drive Manager and see if the SSD is there, if it is then proceed with making your image for the hard drive OS partition. First make a partition on the SSD the same size ad the small partition that is the boot partition for Windows 7, then make another partition the size you want the new OS partition to be. (I have some 64 GB drives in my laptops that are split roughly 40/60% that is the OS partition is 20 GB and the data partition is 40 GB). You may want to use all of the SSD space for the Windows 7 OS, you didn't indicate how big it was. If you are ready to make your image (you have the imaging program and a bootable device that will see the hard drive and SSD) set the new boot partition to 'Active' in the drive manager. When you make your images do one of the boot partition and one of the OS partition, then put each image on the respective SSD partitions. If it will not start from the SSD then you will need a boot manager program such as the one I used here: page 245 of the Self Computer Repair Unleashed! Manual This process is a little long but a lot easier and faster than installing the OS on your new SSD then doing all the tweaking to get the OS back to the way you have it customized now. And you should have a backup of your data and OS partition incase you have a hardware failure. Hope this helps ...

Oct 10, 2011 Rating Migrating an existing OS to another storage device by: Support Hello Sam, You will need to do a couple of things before you can use the SSD as your boot device. Windows 7 makes it a lot harder to change things around with out installing the Operating System( OS) once again. Your best bet is to make an image of the existing OS and store it on a DVD (if it will fit, it may not). On the hard drive how many partitions does it have? If it has one then you may have to do some manipulation of the image file, that is create it and store it on the SSD then move it to the Windows 7 drive then put the image on the SSD, then change the boot drive to the SSD. You need to look at the drives in the Drive Manager (Right click My Computer, select Manage from the menu, go down to the Drive Manager). When you are looking at the drive manager do you see one or two partitions on the hard drive? One partition will be very small 100 MB or less. This is the Boot partition, it is not the OS/System partition, it is only the boot partition. The other partition is the Windows 7 partition, this will have the OS files, your home folder and other programs that you have installed. This partition may be the size of the complete drive or there may be a third partition for data, depends on if you have a drive that the manufacture has spilt in to two partitions for the OS and for your data or were lazy and only created one partition. If you have one partition you can 'shrink' that partition down, before doing this I strongly suggest you back up your data! If you shrink the partition down then you can make another partition for data, that is where you would store you image of the current OS partition. Next you want to find your SSD, if it is not in the Drive Manager you will need to go back in to the BIOS and look at the settings for the storage devices, it may be that a SATA II or III SSD is not compatible with your computer. What you are looking for is under either the Advanced, Storage, or Hard drive section. You are looking for the "mode" parameter for the hard drives. If you have the settings for AHIC or OHIC for your SATA drives try changing it to IDE or Legacy for the SSD (this setting may be for all the drives not an individual drive). Change the setting then restart the computer, if it does not boot to the current Windows 7 drive then the settings are not compatible with the hard drive, this would mean that your BIOS can not have a 'mixed' mode of IDE/Legacy drives with the SATA AHIC/OHIC drives.

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