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So there's a notebook (Lenovo Thinkpad Z61m) with a SATA hard disk, the SATA controller is configured for native AHCI operation & the OS is Windows XP. The hard disk is going to be replaced with an SSD which is larger.

I have an idea of how I'm going to do this, but I want to be sure there isn't something obvious I'm missing.

  • Connect external USB drive
  • Boot some flavour of Linux live CD
  • Use dd to clone the SATA disk to the external drive
  • Power off and replace the SATA disk with the SSD
  • Boot the live CD
  • Use dd to clone back from the external drive to the SSD

Does anyone have anything to add?

quack quixote
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ThatGraemeGuy
  • 3,902

2 Answers2

2

dd probably won't work quite as you expect it to, as you really need something smarter than just a bit-for-bit copy of the raw drive/partition.

Check out Clonezilla, Acronis, DriveImageXML, Ghost / Ghost 4 Unix, and many others.

Goyuix
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0

I was able to migrate my laptop's 500GB drive to a 128GB OCZ SSD in about an hour. The Windows partition was ~150GB (i.e. larger than my SSD) and the 2nd of 3 partitions.

  1. Acquire SATA 2.5" -> USB adapter for about 20 USD/EUR.
  2. Migrate data using (inexpensive) Paragon's Migrate OS to SSD. 6 clicks and you're done.
  3. Install SSD and watch your system boot up faster than you have ever ever seen.

Note: This tool ensures that your SSD partitions are aligned, which Windows 7 can and will take advantage of. I'm fairly certain that XP doesn't support this feature though.

glenneroo
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