OVERVIEW
This will guide you through cloning your Windows Vista/7 installation onto an SSD. When you are finished, you will have two working Windows installations: one on your SSD and one on your HDD. Your personal files can either be on your HDD or your SSD.
Two common errors that occur during cloning are also covered:
Explorer.exe server execution failed
BOOTMGR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart
NOTICE
This guide assumes that the reader is somewhat familiar with hard disk options, partitioning tasks, the registry, disk management, BIOS options, etc.
NOTES
Notes on user experience after cloning system-only to SSD:
Boot-up is significantly faster
Windows Experience Rating on the primary hard disk is maxxed-out at 7.9
Accessing personal files is sometimes slower when located on a separate HDD
Programs run faster if they don’t require you to frequently read/write onto a separate HDD
Notes on deleting a partition containing personal files:
Personally, I was dual booting with Windows XP Pro and Windows 7 Ultimate. After I deleted my personal files partition, I got a BSOD when trying to boot into XP. This wasn’t a major deal because I hardly used it anyway, but, if you want to keep your dual boot working and effectively clone both partitions onto your SSD, then you should seek specific advice on that.
“Disk Clone” option on Easeus Todo Backup only finds entire HDD’s. Therefore, you can’t just clone the system partition--you have to clone the entire hard drive with all its partitions. However, I have read threads where others have used Easeus Todo Backup to perform “Partition Clone” and then recover it onto their SSD. Personally, I chose to “Disk Clone” simply because it appealed to me more.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
· An SSD, of course.
· Free download of Easeus Todo Backup from easeus.com
· Blank CD/DVD and CD/DVD burner to burn a bootable Todo Backup Disk
· Spare HDD, Flash Drive, or SD Card with enough space to copy your personal files onto (optional)
· Bootable Windows disk for your version of Windows (Windows Set-Up/ Installation CD/DVD, Windows System Repair Disk, etc.)
STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS
If you want to have an SSD containing your system and a separate HDD containing your personal files, consider all of these steps. If you want to put everything onto your SSD, skip numbers 6 - 10.
1. Download and install Easeus Todo Backup.
2. Run the program and “Create a bootable disk”.
3. Set the disk aside and exit the program.
4. The goal is to get your HDD’s used disk space below the size of the SSD.
5. You can have partitions on your HDD when you clone it, but the combined size of all the partitions must be less than the usable size of your SSD.
6. Move all of your personal files onto a separate HDD, flash drive, SD card, etc.
7. After copying your personal files to separate media, delete them from off your HDD. Make sure not to delete any of your system files, only your pictures, music, etc. If your personal files were on their own partition, delete the entire partition.
8. If the files were on their own partition, Windows may get confused after you delete it. This is because the libraries configured in Windows may only point to that missing partition. You may get an error that says something like, “
Explorer.exe server execution failed.”
9. If this happens, you have to change values in two registry keys:
a.HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\Personal
b.HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal
10. Review the “Data” column in both of these keys and change all of the values that point or refer to your deleted partition to directories like “C:\Music” or “C:\Pictures”, depending upon the type of files that you’re re-routing.
11. Run a clean-up utility like Windows Disk Cleanup or CCleaner to get rid of some unnecessary files.
12. Shrink all of the partitions that you will be cloning to a size that will allow for expected growth. (Example: My Windows 7 C:\ was using about 30 GB and I shrank it to 60 GB so that I could clone it onto a 64 GB SSD.)
13. Double-check that your HDD’s used space is below the usable size of your SSD.
14. Defrag your partitions before cloning them. It is not recommended to defrag SSD’s because of their limited write life and defragging is hard on them, so, it’s best to have it as neat as possible to begin with.
15. Turn off your PC.
16. Install your SSD into your case.
17. Boot up your machine and enter BIOS. Make sure your SSD port is set to AHCI. Also make sure that your first boot choice is set to your CD drive. Save your settings.
18. Continue to boot to your desktop.
19. Go into Disk Management and you should be prompted with an “Initialize Disk” window. It will say something like, “You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Management can access it.” Choose to use an MBR partition style and click OK. If you’re not prompted, right click the drive and choose to create a new simple drive and perform a quick format.
20. Put your bootable Easeus disk in your drive, reboot, and click any key to boot from your CD.
21. Choose “Disk Clone”, choose your HDD as your source disk, choose your SSD as your destination disk, and click the boxes to “Optimize for SSD” and “Sector by sector clone”. After previewing, click “Proceed” to clone your drive, and choose to shut down your system after cloning is finished.
22. After cloning is finished and your computer is shut down, open up your case and disconnect either your HDD’s power or data cable so that it won’t be detected upon booting.
The object in these next few steps is to make sure that each of your drives has the ability to boot up independently and avoid the possibility of having to rely upon the boot partition of the other drive. This is important because you may wish to remove one of the drives later on. If you want to have both Windows installations listed as choices on a boot menu, then you will need to research how to use the bcedit utility.
23. Boot up your system and don’t worry if you get the error that “
BOOTMGR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart”. If this happens, place your bootable Windows CD with recovery options into your CD/DVD drive and press Ctrl+Alt+Del.
24. After the Windows files load, click “Next” on the language/time screen. On the next screen, choose to “Repair your computer”.
25. Choose the Windows installation on your SSD (your HDD should be disconnected) and click “Next”.
26. Choose “Startup Repair” to correct the bootmgr problem and any other boot problems.
a. You could also select “Command Prompt” rather than Startup Repair and use the command: bootrec /fixboot
27. After repairs are made, your system should boot just fine into your Windows installation on your SSD.
28. Shut your system down, disconnect either your SSD’s power or data cable, and reconnect your HDD.
29. Perform steps 23 – 26 and make sure your system successfully boots into Windows on your HDD.
30. Shut down your system and reconnect your SSD.
31. Boot the system into BIOS.
32. Change your primary hard disk to your SSD, save the setting and make sure it boots up successfully.
33. Reboot, re-enter BIOS, change the primary hard disk to your HDD and make sure it boots up successfully.
34. One last time, reboot, re-enter BIOS, change the primary hard disk to your SSD, and continue booting to desktop.
SUCCESS
Now you have two bootable drives. If your SSD gets in an unreliable state, you can always boot up with your HDD. The HDD may not stay up to date but it’s a good backup source nonetheless.
FINAL STEPS TO INCREASE SSD PERFORMANCE
I have only listed three major tweaks to increase SSD performance. I suggest you perform a search to find many other suggestions to fit your specific needs.
TRIM
If you’re running Vista, you won’t have TRIM support and you should run a disk clean-up utility every now and then. If you have a RAID setup, or if your SSD uses compression, you may also wish to just stick with the occasional disk clean-up due to reported performance issues.
If you’re running Windows 7, verify that TRIM is enabled. It‘s supposed to be enabled in Windows 7 by default but you should still check to make sure. To do this, you can run a command prompt with administrator privileges and type the following command:
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify
Query result = 0 means that TRIM is on, 1 means that TRIM is disabled. To enable TRIM, type the following command:
fsutil behavior query|set DisableDeleteNotify = 0
DISK DEFRAGMENTER
Since defragmenting an SSD doesn’t do much of anything except wear it out faster by writing to it needlessly, you should make sure that Windows Disk Defragmenter isn’t set to run on a schedule on your SSD. To view the settings of Disk Defragmenter, go to
Start\All Programs\Accessories\System Tools\Disk Defragmenter. (My SSD is set to “Never run” because I accidentally clicked to defrag it and was prompted with a warning that defragging was not recommended on an SSD, and it gave me the choice to never run it on that drive.)
If you only have an SSD in your setup and no other HDDs, then you can even go so far as to disable the Disk Defragmenter service altogether in Services.
INDEXING
Indexing is another service that normally doesn’t produce any noticeable increase in a SSD performance. Since the number of writes on an SSD is a major factor of its life span, you want to avoid any unnecessary writing.
Go to the properties of your SSD in My Computer and uncheck the box to
“Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties”.
If you only have an SSD in your set up and no HDD’s, then you could go ahead and disable the “Windows Search” service in Services if you want.
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