Upgrading SSD

[oldsmoboat]

My PC is about 3 years old. I built it with a 128 GB SSD as my boot hdd.
It's now too small. I want to upgrade to at least 512 MB and maybe 1 TB.

But, when I upgraded my wife's hdd to an sdd with the Samsung 830, the software that came with it didn't work. On the Samsung site, they recommended a free app that didn't work either, I don't recall the name. I had to do a fresh install.

I want zero issues. What's they best way to upgrade without a fresh install?

TIA

[Peter.Steele]

There's really no good way to start from a new hard drive without a fresh install.

Even if there was a good way to do it, it's still a **** way to get set up on a new hard drive.

[Joseph Lee]

Clone it.

[AreWeFree]

Clone it.

Yup, you're already on an SSD, cloning in this instance would be fine.

Use Acronis, it's $50. http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/pc-mac-backup/

Although to be perfectly honest, installing from scratch is the best solution, it's the perfect time.

Most of your settings can be copied to your new user profile, just takes an hour to get everything installed/configured the way you like.

[nothinghere2c]

or stall out and wait another month and re-install when you get your free windows 10 upgrade

[sholling]

Clone it.

Exactly. I've used Apricorn's Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit ($24 - $10 rebate) but there are others starting about $10, or you can just do it internally with any one of a number of applications. Just be sure and go through the settings before kicking off the clone. Some default to automatically expand the existing partition to fill the new drive, some assume you'll want multiple partitions on the new drive and just clone the existing partition and leave the rest of the new drive untouched.

BTW that new drive should be a whole heck of a lot faster than the 120GB.

[msternin]

Clone it.

^ this. I used to keep some old Norton Ghosts disks around for just such a purpose. I'm sure there's much better software now.

Cloning works well.

[ExtremeX]

Acronis or any other similar tool should get the job done.

[high_revs]

acronis should work. i have v11 but it won't work on windows 8. see my thread started here about 1 mos ago or so where stilly recommended another s/w to use with win8.

that would be the easiest way (which I wanted, but ended up doing fresh install). no biggie... it's really only a media server so done in 45 mins or so including some downloads like ff/chrome, and some utilities.

[Darklyte27]

I put a samsung 830 SSD in the laptop. The stock HD was a WD 750GB or something and a 3 hr battery life or so. With the SSD it became something around 6.5 or 7 hours.

[JDW67]

Tried several cloning software and none of them worked well. Ended up just doing a fresh install.

[Brutmor]

Boot from Linux live CD.
Use dd to perform a block copy of the old disk to the new disk.
Resize the partition and file system with gparted.

You probably want to find a more complete walk through online though.

[stilly]

IIRC...

With Windows 7 (and maybe XP who knows) if you have an SSD AND a normal HD sometimes it will not load or show the SSD in the setup/installation path. Only when you take the regular HD OUT of the system via unplugging will the SSD show up. Weird.

When cloning win 7 systems and restoring them, it is sometimes necessary to use the win7 setup disk to "fix" the boot up problem.

Macrium Reflex works well with win7 and so does something else, but I forgot what the other product was.

Also, it MIGHT be a good idea to use the windows MIGWIZ to pull stuff from the older drive and move to the newer drive after installing windows.

I am a little confused though, you have 128GB SSD for your windows drive and you have it filled already? WTH you putting on that? I have a 26GB partition for my windows 7 and it has 1.8GB free space. I had to free up space when it dropped down to 429mb for no reason that I know of...
****ing windows 7 grows but 128GB in 3 years is kinda ridiculous. I am thinking she has a lot of stuff in the downloads/my documents and outlook that should be deleted...

[mcm95403]

I do this all the time with Ghost and it works great. Let me know if you need a copy or help with it.

[86mcss]

i personally think you are better of saving all the files she wants and doing a fresh install.