Installing a New SSD

So you've got a new computer and along with it you bought an SSD, and why not, because the transfer rates are much faster, the power consumption is much lower and there is no noise associated with it.  However, SSDs are more expensive and so while your new computer came with a 1Tb HDD, your SSD is only 120Gb, for example.  How do you get everything from that HDD to the new SSD?  The way we do it here is to use Acronis.  We have the Advanced Workstation 11 version, although True Image Home 2013 will work more or less the same.

The method is simple:
1. Boot windows and resize the partitions to the size you require
2. Reboot into Acronis Recovery CD and perform a Disk Backup.
3. Install SSD into the computer
4. Boot into Acronis Recovery CD and perform a Volume Restore (select all Volumes)
5. Reboot the computer into Windows

I will assume that most of these steps you can figure out for yourselves but I will comment on a few of the steps.

Step 1. Use Windows Disk Management, you will likely find 3 volumes on Disk 0.  SYSTEM, OS and RECOVERY.  OS is the volume with Windows installed and takes up all but 10Gb of the drive.  Right-click on this partition and select "Shrink Volume".  You probably want this volume to take up all the space you can on the SSD.  Which in this case is 120Gb - 100Mb (system) - 10Gb (recovery) = 109Gb, it is better to underestimate at this stage.  If your SSD is smaller than 60Gb  then see my next article on shrinking the boot partition.

Step 2. On the Sony Vaio that we recently upgraded, Acronis would not boot.  The answer was to change the Boot option to legacy.

Step 4. You have to perform a volume restore because your disk is smaller, however, we've seen tutorials saying you need to do one volume at a time and create the partitions in advance.  No you don't!  At least not with the later versions of Acronis.  Simply select all the partitions and restore them to the SSD.

NOTE: My latest post specifically about creating space on the system drive may offer further steps to help with installing an SSD http://pcsupportgroup.blogspot.com/2012/10/creating-more-space-on-c-drive.html

NOTE: UEFI boot records are becoming more common.  The later versions of Acronis are EFI aware but prefer to create a new EFI partition rather than work with the existing one.  In our tests this has resulted in an operational OS but the boot-time recovery options did not work.  We felt this was acceptable as a separate image backup was being used anyway so it was unlikely that this recovery option would be required.  We also kept the original HDD.  There may be ways to correct this but we did no further investigation.

Please contact The PC Support Group on +44 (0) 845 2233116 if you require further help with this.