heywood on 6/11/2011 at 01:31
That should work, as long as you don't reconnect the old drive to the same port afterward, in which case it might switch back. If you still want to use the old drive, you can always swap ports/connectors between the two drives, restore the image to the new drive a second time while the old drive is powered off, and then plug in the power to the old drive.
And for future reference, you can use the Windows system image tool to do this as long as the partition you're restoring the image onto is equal size or larger than the partition it came from. You only need 3rd party tools if trying to go from a larger partition to a smaller one.
gunsmoke on 7/11/2011 at 04:25
I forgot to say thanks to Nathan for the help. Worked like a charm!
Nathan on 7/11/2011 at 23:54
Glad I could help Gunsmoke!
Dirty_Brute on 17/11/2011 at 06:45
Was considering getting an SSD drive but they are expensive and small in size. I'll stick with my 150 gig RaptorX. It's pretty fast and have had it for years. Might upgrade to the 300 gig version.
They need to lower the price on these SSD drives. Too expensive for their small size.
twisty on 23/11/2011 at 14:34
I noticed this thread a little late but one little trick I've been doing for years to keep my C drive as small as possible is by using symbolic links (aka junctions). In summary, Windows allows you to move the physical location of a folder to somewhere else but retain the link to the new location in the original position. As far as any applications are concerned, they treat the original folder location as if nothing has changed, so there is no need to change any registry settings or reinstall any applications.
According to the following page, Windows 2k was the first Windows OS to include Junctions, but to be honest, I didn't discover this myself until XP.
(
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768)
FYI, you can use MKLINK in Windows 7 (and Vista) to do the same thing as Junctions, so no need to download anything.
Matthew on 23/11/2011 at 15:05
You can also do it more simply with some system folders such as My Documents via the Properties tabs.
twisty on 24/11/2011 at 05:07
True. My Documents, videos, pictures etc can be moved via right-clicking on the folder and changing the location. However there is no such option for directories within %users%, common files etc, and a lot of applications make an executive decision to keep large amounts of required files within these folders. Adobe and Apple come to mind.
zombe on 28/11/2011 at 15:58
Minecraft is one of thous asshats that drops its huge saves in appdata ... i worked around that problem by linking (symbolic link [ntfs filesystem is needed for thous] with a sysinternals program ... "Junktion"? ) the folder to a folder on another drive. :D
edit:
Jep, seems to be: (
http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Junction.zip)
It is free, in case anyone wonders. PS. Vista & 7 already have it (named "mklink"), so no need to install anything. [ mklink /d "original folder" "new folder" ]. mklink creates the folder - so, move the original one to your destination first.
Thirith on 29/11/2011 at 07:46
Epilogue on my part: after I screwed up the first attempt at this, ending up with two partitions on two separate disks holding different system folders and Windows Update/Installer not working any more, yesterday I took the morning to try to fix this. I unhooked the newer, bigger SSD and successfully booted from the smaller SSD which I'd originally cloned onto the larger drive. I wasn't sure it'd work, since some of the files had been accessed and probably modified in the meantime, but it worked just fine - so I was able to revert to that point and follow everyone's instructions. I've now got everything as it should be : the new drive is C:, all the system folders are on it, the old SSD has been formatted, Windows Update and Installer work as they should. Yay!
