Best way to add SSD?

[yoji]

Hi, hope you can help...

My sys is Win7 ult 64 bit - on a ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 Mobo
Its currently got 2 x 500GB drive in Raid 0, partioned into 4 drives (C, D, E, F)
The C drive is 50GB and in general I have C=system, D=Apps, E=my data and F=Games

In general I have the "system" backed up with windows backup, along with the data from the E-drive to external NAS storage.

What I am thinking of doing is buying a SSD... prob 120/128GB and use that as my system partition.

So.. the question...

Whats the best way to do this? somehow I need to remove/hide the current C partion, set up the SSD as the new C drive and
restore the system from the backup to the new SSD C drive. I appreciate that new C drive would be outside of any Raid....but rest would stay Raid. Ideally I could reassign the space from the old C drive to other drives - but if I have to lose it... no big loss.

If I did this - all apps/saves etc would continue to work OK?

Is that possible? - or am I being too optimistic? and I really need to plan for a complete backup/restore? Having just had the "fun" of discovering that Vista would not recover its backup to a HD smaller than the original has shaken my faith in assuming I can be logical about this.... so I need to tap into some experience 😉

Whats the sage advice from you experts out there please?

If you have questions - please just shout up.
Thanks in advance

 

[kajabla]

Why did you feel the need to partition your drive?

 

[inzone]

The problem you are facing is the you cannot erase/delete/format the C drive and the way to put the Windows on to the SSD would be to remove the two drives by diconnecting them and then loading Windows on the SSD. You can create a mirror image from you current Windows install to be used later to recover the settings. Then when you start the Pc up you will have the option of picking the Windows install to load up and recover the settings from the mirror image.

One way to delete the C drive is to use Linux. You download Linux to a bootable usb stick. Disconnect the SSD, then with the stick in the usb slot start the computer up with the two drives in raid conncted and when you have the option to install Linux say yes and you can choose to load Linux onto the C drive(not the SSD C drive) and once it starts it says that the Windows install will be over writen and you say yes but before it finishes you stop it and the Windows install will be corrupted and you can now delete/format/divide up that partition.

One thing you may now encounter is that the Windows install on the SSD will not know where anything is on the other partitions and I don't know if the mirror reload will help with that. It's not perfect but it may take some work to finally straighten it all out.

 

[yoji]

Best answer selected by yoji.

 

[nikorr]

This topic has been closed by Nikorr.