PM HDD Replacement

[JHZR2]

Ive been burned once or twice with bad HDDs or nearly bad HDDs. Desktop and laptop. Say after many years of hard use, I want to just replace the HDD with one of similar or better quality, or maybe even change type, say from a rotating to SSD. What is the best way to get everything over? For example on my 08 MBP, say I wanted to swap to an SSD because they are very fast (my MBA boots far faster than my 7200 RPM MBP, which is still really quick, like <15 sec). My setup is very complex, dual boot, parallels, windows and Mac, different file systems, etc. Is there a way to just image all this stuff over, even if the HDD was a different capacity? What is the best way to do this? Thanks!

 

[OldCowboy]

Backup and restore.

 

[JHZR2]

I don't know that all my 3rd party SW, etc will work then. Plus serial numbers for all the SW, etc. ( I own all my SW). Because I have dual boot and parallels and so I don't want that to screw up. That's why I'd like to be able to "image" my hdd and then overlay that image, formatting, etc onto another hdd.

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: JHZR2

I don't know that all my 3rd party SW, etc will work then. Plus serial numbers for all the SW, etc. ( I own all my SW). Because I have dual boot and parallels and so I don't want that to screw up. That's why I'd like to be able to "image" my hdd and then overlay that image, formatting, etc onto another hdd.

DriveImage will copy it.

 

[Iain]

Originally Posted By: JHZR2

I don't know that all my 3rd party SW, etc will work then. Plus serial numbers for all the SW, etc. ( I own all my SW). Because I have dual boot and parallels and so I don't want that to screw up. That's why I'd like to be able to "image" my hdd and then overlay that image, formatting, etc onto another hdd.

If you're running a high-end version of Vista SP2 or Windows 7, use MS native Complete PC Backup and Restore to create an image of any disk in system to external HD drive. I've found it quite reliable.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

I suggest Acronis Home image program for creating disk to disk images, cheap, works great. Feels good to have an exact clone of the boot disk in case it takes a dump, especially on setups like yours where it takes literally days to reinstall everything.

 

[Rand]

+1 acronis. just make sure you optimize any settings for SSD. ie fresh installs of W7 turn on and off various things for SSD's vs hdd's Also make sure your partitions are aligned when done. or you will have issues. here...

 

[JHZR2]

Im not talking W7. Im talking multi-OSes on a single HDD with multiple partitions, different file systems on it, etc. The SSD makes it sound even more complex... Great. Not sure if I should try this endeavour.

 

[Rand]

w7 was an example. for instance it turns off superfetch defrag and a bunch of other stuff if you fresh install it. you can do a straight resize/image of partitions with a tool such as acronis. it works very good just make sure the partitions are aligned or you will have performance issues. acronis costs about 30$ and is available for direct download. You arent speaking greek to me. if you want detailed help I would need details instead of generalities. ie exactly what your setup is.. yes the whole book it seems like lol. I would also say its not an extremely easy task and not something to be undertaken without a full backup anyway. For instance on w7 if you old hdd was installed in ide compatibility mode you have to fresh install to get it to work after changing the bios to AHCI mode(for advanced features such as NCQ) I ran into this issue when trying to migrate from a raid 0 to a SSD even though I was imaging windows didnt have the ahci drivers loaded so it would bluescreen until I set it to ide mode.. which isnt optimal.. It can be somewhere between 3 year old could do it.. to [censored] just happened and pulling your hair out.

 

[PandaBear]

Why would SSD make it more complex? it is just the same interface but likely smaller size.

 

[javacontour]

While I did not have multiple OS's, I did upgrade from a 640gb WD drive to a 1TB WD Caviar. WD has their version of Acronis that you can D/L and use if you have a WD drive in your machine. It copied all the partitions in my machine from the smaller drive to the larger without drama. I suppose if you are really going to run multiple OS's, it may be worth some effort to convert to VMs. That way you migrate ONE host instead of multiple OS partitions. But my point is, the drive makers seem to have utilities to copy your data to the new drive. My old drive was/is still bootable. I keep it in the machine to store data and have another bootable drive on hand, ready to go.

 

[Rand]

I could write a book but here is a link to start with about aligning partitions and SSD but Its somewhat bleh and this link explains it good. http://www.storagereview.com/impact_misalignment If you don't understand something you can pm me and I'll try to explain it better.

Quote:

Why misaligned partitions are the problem for SSD SSDs are becoming more common in mobile PCs and even being implemented in high-end desktop computers. The reason for this is that the speed of an SSD is dramatically faster than a standard hard drive and can increase Windows boot time and other tasks. The problems arise when users migrate data to a new SSD or create new partitions on the drive for better data segmentation. Misaligned partition problems are even more important for SSD drives than traditional hard disk drives. Most modern SSD drives are designed using the newer 4K alignment rules. Thus all previously-mentioned problems are the same for SSD partitions alignment. Besides a decline in system speed, SSD owners need to be concerned with degradation of the SSD memory cells. Because of the nature of an SSD, a misaligned disk creates an overbearing workload to read, modify and write to these drives. So if partitions on an SSD are misaligned, beside a downgraded system speed, the solid state drive is in danger of being unusable. Many people are not aware that an SSD drive has a limited amount of read/write cycles and when the drive is written on too many times, the drive stops working, risking a catastrophic failure and data loss. Partitions alignment eliminates all redundant read/write operations and thus grants SSDs a longer lifetime.

 

[JHZR2]

Originally Posted By: Rand

You arent speaking greek to me. if you want detailed help I would need details instead of generalities.

My setup is a 2008 Macbook Pro, set up to run WIN XP and mac. I have parallels so I can boot into either XP or OSX, or run XP in OSX. My fear is that getting screwed up. That said, I generally distrust HDDs, and while my 7200 RPM drive is fast, the SSD in my macbook air is much faster, so Id like to try to move to an SSD. My current HDD is 200GB. Id like to also go a bit larger if possible... So that's what I have. And Id like to keep everything as-is so I dont have to go back in and re-register all my MS software, go dig out all the serial numbers for everything, and risk that parallels wont work correctly. That's why I thought if I had an image that I could just copy onto the new HDD (even if I had to size the copy partitions exactly the same and have the other partition show up as another "drive", then Id minimize risk... At least that's what my thought process was...

 

[Rand]

a larger than 200gb ssd thats good will run 400-500$ A good drive imager like acronis can copy it perfectly.. but sometimes when switching to ssd it wont be aligned. you would also need some sort of usb to sata cable so you could set it up. Worst case.. you copy it and it doesnt work or isnt aligned you would still have the org. drive to put back in until you can figure out what the fix involves. If you do it right acronis will automatically align your partitions and it will all just work a link http://forum.acronis.com/forum/24224 I would recommend a Crucial because most of the latest ocz(brand) of all series(vertex solid etc) have about a 50% fail rate. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148443 382$ from newegg. for a 256

 

[JHZR2]

This may be my answer here: http://gigaom.com/apple/how-to-image-os-x-and-boot-camp-to-a-new-mac/ Now, say I want to upgrade from XP to Win 7 on the windows side, I assume that operating inside of windows (booted natively and/or off the DVD), I could do that and everything would still work? Not sure if parallels would know to boot into Win 7 or if it would be looking for some sign of XP on there and get screwed up? My Windows partition is NTFS, BTW, not FAT32, FWIW.

 

[JHZR2]

Originally Posted By: Rand

If you do it right acronis will automatically align your partitions and it will all just work

Thanks so much for your help! What still confuses me is if the Acronis (I assume running from a native Windows boot-up) will actually image the mac partition, and if so, then after putting the image back onto a new drive, if it will create the MBR correctly so that the Mac partition is the correct boot partition and what is used by default.

 

[Rand]

you would make their rescue cd and boot from that. then image your current drive to your new ssd attached with a usb to sata adaptor (or second sata port if you have 2 available I'm assuming 1 due to notebook) From the acronis forum they are suggesting moving each partition separately to make sure it auto aligns correctly. Then when all this is done you would disconnect the usb adaptor. shut down the notebook. remove notebook hdd replace with new ssd then power up and it should be good. note: you should also be able to do it from windows, but I'm not positive with your setup. Would depend on if its a virtual machine type setup(ie virtual hdd's too) vs a shared hardware setup. There is nothing really super special about acronis.. it just seems to work the best for me. You could substitute another drive utility even free ones but some have issues with imaging/restoring to different size drives etc.

 

[Cujet]

My solution: 1) External hard drive for files, connected only when transferring files. 2) SSD w/win-7 ultimate. No drive mirroring, no backup programs, no virus programs.

 

[wander2039]

Originally Posted By: JHZR2

Ive been burned once or twice with bad HDDs or nearly bad HDDs. Desktop and laptop. Say after many years of hard use, I want to just replace the HDD with one of similar or better quality, or maybe even change type, say from a rotating to SSD. What is the best way to get everything over? For example on my 08 MBP, say I wanted to swap to an SSD because they are very fast (my MBA boots far faster than my 7200 RPM MBP, which is still really quick, like <15 sec). My setup is very complex, dual boot, parallels, windows and Mac, different file systems, etc. Is there a way to just image all this stuff over, even if the HDD was a different capacity? What is the best way to do this? Thanks!

Same here.. the key is keep your files elsewhere or at least back them up elsewhere. Got a 2TB NAS units with 2 HD's and RAID 0. If one goes out replace it.. granted they could both go out at the same time.

 

[JHZR2]

I think you mean RAID 1?