Is it possible to image a larger hard drive onto a smaller SSD drive?

Asked by 2davidc8 (10189

) January 17th, 2012

I can see how it should be relatively easy to copy a smaller drive onto a larger one, but how about the reverse?

In my case, I have a relatively new computer with a 1TB hard drive, so it doesn’t have that much on it yet, about 50 or 60 GB. The tower has room for a second drive, and I would like to get a 250GB SSD. Next, I would like to “image” the original hard drive onto the SSD, so that the OS (Windows 7) will be on it, and make it the c: drive.

Have any of you techie jellies done anything like this successfully? Is there software (maybe Norton Ghost??) that will let you do this? What are the pitfalls? How do I get the machine to boot up from the new SSD?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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2 Answers

As long as the HD doesn’t have more on it as than the SSD can handle then you can clone the HD on to the other drive. But I wouldn’t. When you install windows 7 it detects whether it’s installed on a HD or a SSD and configures windows differently with special optimisations for the SSD. If you clone the drive across then you’ll have to change all the settings yourself. You’re better off just to perform a clean install.

Lightlyseared (34831

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Maybe it’s because I’ve used Intel SSDs, but I’ve always found that after cloning (and I’ve done it a lot), the optimization settings have already been applied (such as the turning off of the defragmenter).

DominicX (28808

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