Can I ghost/copy my OS partition to my SSD?

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w4ffles

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I finally got around to installing my X25-M 80GB and was wondering if I could completely move my OS partition, which is 40GB total 20GB free, from my hard drive rather than reinstall everything. If so, would all my programs run like nothing had changed since the drive paths would be the same?

I haven't created any partitions yet, but I've updated the firmware and did a quick check with Intel's SSD toolbox.
 
Yes. You'll want to make sure the partition is aligned with the SSD's block boundaries and you may need to tweak some settings inside the OS (caching, defrag, etc.) for best performance. The system sees the SSD just like any other SATA drive though, so you can definitely copy it. I copied several of my existing partitions onto my SSD when I got it.
 
One thing you must watch out for if you are using Vista is that Ghost has some issue with correctly copying the MBR. A friend just ran into that, he cloned the HDD to a new HDD, and the new one gave him an error on boot up, he needed his Vista disc to recover, took all of 3 seconds to recover whatever file it was, NETDLR or something. So it works, just that one quirk I guess, dont think XP or W7 has this issue.
 
Great, I have Windows 7. Hopefully I won't run into that issue.

InvisiBill said:
Yes. You'll want to make sure the partition is aligned with the SSD's block boundaries and you may need to tweak some settings inside the OS (caching, defrag, etc.) for best performance.
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After a bit of quick googling, I'm guessing I should use "diskpar" to align the drive. What's the recommended settings to use?
 
w4ffles said:
Great, I have Windows 7. Hopefully I won't run into that issue.


After a bit of quick googling, I'm guessing I should use "diskpar" to align the drive. What's the recommended settings to use?
Click to expand...

If you are already running Windows 7, just connect the X25-M as a secondary drive and initialize/format the drive from Disk Management. 7 should provide the correct alignment without you having to mess with diskpar or diskpart; then you can use a cloning utility that leaves the existing partition alignment intact to move your OS install over. I can't recall the ones that do this ATM (not all of them do) but some have been mentioned in other threads. I'd definitely research this part before just using any old drive clone utility, otherwise your SSD's performance and lifespan could be significantly affected.
 
imyourzero said:
If you are already running Windows 7, just connect the X25-M as a secondary drive and initialize/format the drive from Disk Management. 7 should provide the correct alignment without you having to mess with diskpar or diskpart; then you can use a cloning utility that leaves the existing partition alignment intact to move your OS install over. I can't recall the ones that do this ATM (not all of them do) but some have been mentioned in other threads. I'd definitely research this part before just using any old drive clone utility, otherwise your SSD's performance and lifespan could be significantly affected.
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Thanks for the heads up. I'll look around for a utility.
 
If you were already running Win7 then you already have a drive w/an aligned partition, you just went to preserve that offset when imaging the partition unto the SSD... If you're actually using Ghost then that will work (at 'least 14.0 or later will, probably 12.0 too... I could test that, I think I have it somewhere), other drive imaging programs will work as well. I know Ghost will even let you resize a partition and still preserve the proper offset tho, which is nice. Haven't run into any issues w/the MBR on my end but I think I read of someone that did (has to do w/the settings you pick when creating the image probably). Related thread.
 
Modred189 said:
What's the risk if you don't 'preserve the offset'?
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You hurt the performance. Instead of having the filesystem's chunks aligned with the SSD's physical memory blocks, each chunk in the filesystem will end up spread across two blocks. Each operation on a chunk of the filesystem will involve two blocks of the SSD rather than one.
 
Yeah, it doesn't hurt performance as much on Intel drives as it does on other SSD (where the impact is huge), but it's silly not to do it right anyway.
 
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