Anyways, we will use the built-in backup tool here, especially because it’s free, it’s very simple, and it doesn’t misallign you partition. Some say it’s only from Windows 7 Proffesional and up, but I wouldn’t know, since I run Windows 7 Pro here, and the tool worked for me. Windows 7 has a brilliant backup tool build in. When that is done it will boot into Windows, and your disk has been shrinked to the wanted size. When your computer has rebooted, a short status-screen will pop up during Windows loading, telling you what is going on. Windows 7 has a 100 MB hidden partition, that it brings on over to your new drive when you’re cloning, so basically, resize your c: partition to approx the size of the disk you want to clone to, minus 100 or 200 MB. I personally changed my c: partition from 400 GB to 100 GB. Go set the size of the system partition c: using the rulers, press the button Apply, and reboot when it asks you to do so. Just download the app, install it, and run it. Partition Wizard is a brilliant app for this task ( Get it here!). Windows own Disk Manager wouldn’t let me touch my system partition though, so I had to find a good 3rd party app, that would let me shrink my system partition. Since my new SSD disk only could hold 160 GB, I clearly needed to shrink down my 500 GB partition to fit it on the new SSD. I personally had a 500 GB disk without any partitions except the one I used for Windows 7. When it’s done, simply close the program, and proceed. Choose to defrag your c: drive, or where ever you have your Windows 7 installed. So what you need to use is PerfectDisk 10 ( Get it here!). Windows defrag sadly won’t do here, since it doesn’t move the pagefile, as far as I have experienced anyways. We need to change that somehow, so you can resize your system partition.įirst thing I did was to defrag my current harddrive. So that means, if you have a 500 gb harddisk, all system files, and other files you might have on the drive, will most commonly be placed in the beginning of your drive, where a pagefile will be placed in the very end of your drive. Windows 7 has a habbit of placing some systemfiles in the very end of the harddisk. Step 1: Setting system disk partition down So let’s start looking at making your current system partition smaller. If you for instance have Windows 7 installed on one big partition that is bigger than the disk you wanna clone to, the restore function of any cloning tool will tell you, that it can’t clone the image, since your target disk doesn’t have space enough. Since we want to “clone” the system from one disk to another, we will need to make the size of the backup image we’re going to use smaller. The scenario is we have windows 7 installed on our HDD which is most likely bigger than the SSD we want to transfer to. Ok, to begin this guide I’ll set up some kind of overview of what we have to do here. Proceed below to read my humble guide on how I switched from a 500 GB HDD to a 160 GB SSD. And it’s not even as bad as it might seem, and best of all, it won’t cost you a daime. So would it be possible to take your current install from a much bigger harddrive over to one of the small and fast SSD’s, without reinstalling? Yes, ofcourse. But you just installed Windows 7, all your apps, and got settled in Microsofts new OS, and really don’t wanna spend an entire day reinstalling it all again. So you decided to upgrade your current harddrive with a blazingly fast SSD.
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