Replacing HDD with SSD

[AI1694]

Owned my Samsung laptop for 5 years now. The battery is completely dead so I can only use it with the charger plugged in. New battery is on the agenda. Apart from that it works fine and is perfect for my needs.

I am thinking to replace the internal HDD with an SSD. Primarily to prolong the laptop’s life. Anyone have any experience of doing so? And is it a big job?

[Derek Smith]

Very simple and straightforward. There's probably a YT video on the subject. It will make a significant improvement in the speed of boot up. There might well be other improvements, depending on what you use your laptop for.

Earlier this year I upgraded my desktop to SDD. Initially it was great, better than doubling of ram. For a couple of weeks I was well impressed. Then the SSD died and nothing I could do would start the damn thing again.

It was a Kingston SSD and they were prompt with the refund, asking just the obvious questions then agreeing that it had indeed gone bang. They sent pre-paid packaging. I've absolutely no problems with their service.

With their SSD was a link to Acronis cloning software, similar to the free Macrium programme I have used for a while now. Acronis has a slightly better interface, but I stuck with Macrium as I'd got used to it.

Also included was a little case for the SSD in order to connect it to the computer. All done for me.

Kingston was a little more expensive but had everything included. I'll probably go for them again when I feel like taking a risk again.

I'd check with the cost of a replacement laptop though, especially if you use it, or are likely to use it in the near future, for anything demanding. 5 years is a long time. Mind you, I've got a 5-year-old laptop, but all I use it for is internet and word processing.

[anonymous-user]

I'm in the middle of doing it now with daughter #2's laptop. Swapping the HDD is a piece of cake. Restoring an image of the old HDD to the new one is ... less cake-like (I'm using nothing more sophisticated that a WindowsImageBackup and using that to restore). I'm about 85% of the way there now, and I could do a second one a lot more quickly, but as always with this sort of thing I have explored many blind alleys.

[Mr Pointy]

Greg66 said:

I'm in the middle of doing it now with daughter #2's laptop. Swapping the HDD is a piece of cake. Restoring an image of the old HDD to the new one is ... less cake-like (I'm using nothing more sophisticated that a WindowsImageBackup and using that to restore). I'm about 85% of the way there now, and I could do a second one a lot more quickly, but as always with this sort of thing I have explored many blind alleys.

Use Macrium. It's free & brilliant. Always make a Recovery/Rescue disc first.
https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

[anonymous-user]

Mr Pointy said:

Greg66 said:

I'm in the middle of doing it now with daughter #2's laptop. Swapping the HDD is a piece of cake. Restoring an image of the old HDD to the new one is ... less cake-like (I'm using nothing more sophisticated that a WindowsImageBackup and using that to restore). I'm about 85% of the way there now, and I could do a second one a lot more quickly, but as always with this sort of thing I have explored many blind alleys.

Use Macrium. It's free & brilliant. Always make a Recovery/Rescue disc first.
https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Now there's ("Always make a recovery/rescue disc first") the problem.

The HDD in the laptop has failed - at least it's so close to death as to make no odds - 15 minutes to boot up, very slow, then BSOD, BIOS diagnostics says it's fooked, leave it a while and it will do it's ultra slow boot up again before dying, etc. Reading around it seems this particular model has an issue with the read/write heads, and that looks like what's struck here.

Anyway, the point it that by the time I realised there was a need to replace it (as opposed to thinking it was slow because it is forever running windows updates, or anti-virus downloads, or running overdue backups on startup etc), it was too late to image it. Fortunately I do image all the OS-bearing HDDs in the house once a year, using Windows Imaging, but at Xmas when I have some time on my hands. So I'm stuck with an old Windows image, and only a Windows Image.

[Mr Pointy]

Greg66 said:

Mr Pointy said:

Greg66 said:

I'm in the middle of doing it now with daughter #2's laptop. Swapping the HDD is a piece of cake. Restoring an image of the old HDD to the new one is ... less cake-like (I'm using nothing more sophisticated that a WindowsImageBackup and using that to restore). I'm about 85% of the way there now, and I could do a second one a lot more quickly, but as always with this sort of thing I have explored many blind alleys.

Use Macrium. It's free & brilliant. Always make a Recovery/Rescue disc first.
https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Now there's ("Always make a recovery/rescue disc first") the problem.

The HDD in the laptop has failed - at least it's so close to death as to make no odds - 15 minutes to boot up, very slow, then BSOD, BIOS diagnostics says it's fooked, leave it a while and it will do it's ultra slow boot up again before dying, etc. Reading around it seems this particular model has an issue with the read/write heads, and that looks like what's struck here.

Anyway, the point it that by the time I realised there was a need to replace it (as opposed to thinking it was slow because it is forever running windows updates, or anti-virus downloads, or running overdue backups on startup etc), it was too late to image it. Fortunately I do image all the OS-bearing HDDs in the house once a year, using Windows Imaging, but at Xmas when I have some time on my hands. So I'm stuck with an old Windows image, and only a Windows Image.

Maybe consider upgrading to Windows 10? I think it's still free.

[AI1694]

Thanks, helpful pointers and advice there.

I only use laptop for Internet browsing, movies and general things like Microsoft Office although rarely nowadays.

So in a nutshell, buy an SSD, connect it to my laptop externally, transfer a system image to it then replace HDD with the SSD?

[anonymous-user]

AI1694 said:

Thanks, helpful pointers and advice there.

I only use laptop for Internet browsing, movies and general things like Microsoft Office although rarely nowadays.

So in a nutshell, buy an SSD, connect it to my laptop externally, transfer a system image to it then replace HDD with the SSD?

I don't think it works if your system image is on the same disc you're trying to restore the system image to. At least I had no joy that way.

My advice:

1. Take a system image. Either write it to, or create it on the root directory of an external (USB connected is fine) drive.
2. Fit the new SSD.
3. Use your Win installation disc (make sure that if your image is of a 64 bit OS, the disc is also a 64 bit OS version; ditto 32 bit. The two don't mix in this environment) to boot up the laptop; go to the Repair Windows options, and then work your way towards restore from an image. Navigate to the image on the external drive and restore. Then wait for it to do its restoration thing.

That *should* work, though it's possible you may have to install Win from the installation disc onto the SSD, then use the OS on the SSD to restore the image from the external drive (that will overwrite your fresh installation on the new SSD).

Or use a third party piece of software and an external hardware dual disc dock to clone, which is probably much easier but a bit more £.

[gr1340]

Buy Windows 10 from ebay for less than £10

Put SSD in laptop and do fresh install


I will wait for the OEM brigade to pipe up now!

[AI1694]

Greg66 said:

I don't think it works if your system image is on the same disc you're trying to restore the system image to. At least I had no joy that way.

My advice:

1. Take a system image. Either write it to, or create it on the root directory of an external (USB connected is fine) drive.
2. Fit the new SSD.
3. Use your Win installation disc (make sure that if your image is of a 64 bit OS, the disc is also a 64 bit OS version; ditto 32 bit. The two don't mix in this environment) to boot up the laptop; go to the Repair Windows options, and then work your way towards restore from an image. Navigate to the image on the external drive and restore. Then wait for it to do its restoration thing.

That *should* work, though it's possible you may have to install Win from the installation disc onto the SSD, then use the OS on the SSD to restore the image from the external drive (that will overwrite your fresh installation on the new SSD).

Or use a third party piece of software and an external hardware dual disc dock to clone, which is probably much easier but a bit more £.

Seems a tad more complicated then I thought it would be!
I don’t have a Windows disc. My upgraded to Windows 10 back in 2015 when it was free.

Either way I’ll be needing another external drive won’t I?

[gr1340]

You can download Windows 10 on to USB:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/...

Install and get W10 key:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/INSTANT-WINDOWS-10-PRO-...

[anonymous-user]

AI1694 said:

Seems a tad more complicated then I thought it would be!
I don’t have a Windows disc. My upgraded to Windows 10 back in 2015 when it was free.

Either way I’ll be needing another external drive won’t I?

I couldn't find my Win 7 disc, but there's a site called heidoc.net that has .ISO downloads that enable you to burn a disc. It's supposed to be legit, but as I was only using the DL to get my legit copy up and running again, I won't be losing any sleep over whether it really is or isn't.

But yes to an external disc. My Windows image of the dead HDD was 75GB. Too big for anything other than an external disc.

I thought briefly about partitioning the new disc and putting the image on the second partition to pull onto the first. But I'm fairly sure that you can't reload a windows image onto a disc smaller than the disc from which it came (irrespective of the size of the image file). Or something. Any, I skipped that.

[Nigel_O]

Greg66 said:

I'm fairly sure that you can't reload a windows image onto a disc smaller than the disc from which it came (irrespective of the size of the image file). Or something.

I had a fair bit of hassle setting up a 500GB Sandisk SSD using an image taken from a 750GB HDD. Got there in the end, but it wasn't easy (for a non-techie, anyway)

Well worth it in the end though - laptop boots from cold in about 30 seconds and from sleep in about 5 seconds

[33q]

I'm thinking of upgrading my HDD to SDD

I was thinking of just getting a 250GB one as I store my files in the cloud. ....but my HDD is 1TB

What problems am I likely to encounter?

[AI1694]

Nigel_O said:

I had a fair bit of hassle setting up a 500GB Sandisk SSD using an image taken from a 750GB HDD. Got there in the end, but it wasn't easy (for a non-techie, anyway)

Well worth it in the end though - laptop boots from cold in about 30 seconds and from sleep in about 5 seconds

Could you pm me please on how you managed to do this? I’m in the same boat, laptop has a 750gb HDD and I am looking to buy a 500gb SSD..

[Nigel_O]

AI1694 said:

Could you pm me please on how you managed to do this? I’m in the same boat, laptop has a 750gb HDD and I am looking to buy a 500gb SSD..

Ah - that assumes I can remember....

I really can't remember how I did it (a fair bit of Googling and YouTube video watching, I think)

Unless a proper PC hardware engineer can contribute and guide you through it, I'd say you'd be better off shelling out a bit extra for a 1TB SSD - still only £130 - £190, depending on make

EDIT - for what its worth, I think I may have had to partition the original HDD so that the primary partition was smaller than the SSD - that meant that the transfer worked OK - it was three or four years ago though, so my memory could well be a bit fuzzy. I was pretty glad I sorted it though - took me most of a weekend...

[Mr Pointy]

AI1694 said:

Could you pm me please on how you managed to do this? I’m in the same boat, laptop has a 750gb HDD and I am looking to buy a 500gb SSD..

Assuming that you have less than 500Gb of files I'm pretty sure Macrium will take care of this during the cloning procedure.
https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW72/C...

Of course if you have more than 500Gb of files you need to dump some or buy a bigger SSD.

[Mr Pointy]

AI1694 said:

Seems a tad more complicated then I thought it would be!
I don’t have a Windows disc. My upgraded to Windows 10 back in 2015 when it was free.

Either way I’ll be needing another external drive won’t I?

Honestly it's not that difficult & you only need the new SSD & a USB to SATA cable like this one:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/USB-SATA-Adapter-Cable-Dr...

• Load Macrium on to the old HDD. Use it to make a recovery/Rescue USB key (this might be needed later)
• Attached the new SSD to a USB port
• Use Macrium to clone the HDD onto the SSD. You may need to fiddle with partition sizes & make sure you copy all of the partions
• Take out the old HDD & put in the new SSD. With luck it will boot ok & you're done.
• If it doesn't boot re-boot from the Recovery USB & follow the instructions to correct the issue with the SDD boot partition

It's really very easy in the vast majority of cases.

[Derek Smith]

AI1694 said:

Thanks, helpful pointers and advice there.

I only use laptop for Internet browsing, movies and general things like Microsoft Office although rarely nowadays.

So in a nutshell, buy an SSD, connect it to my laptop externally, transfer a system image to it then replace HDD with the SSD?

Go to YouTube and search with: cloning an operating system disc with macrium

You'll get a choice of course. Try a couple.

As I said earlier, the Kingston SSD came with a USB connected case. Worked first time.

I use a 'spare' HDD that I clone to regularly. I also have another where I cloned a clean install of Win10. I've not had any problems.

Edited to add: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q64Jm8hSlWs shows cloning to a Kingston SSD using Acronis. It's free with the kit. If you prefer the interface, it's probably the way to go.

Edited by Derek Smith on Friday 7th December 20:43

[anonymous-user]

Mr Pointy said:

aybe consider upgrading to Windows 10? I think it's still free.

Dude, Win 7 Pro is fine for me. But then I use the last version of Word that was any good (2003) and only use later versions of Outlook because they can cope with large file sizes.

Change is bad. And the ribbon is a fking horror!