installing a SSD and moving Windows 8 - no disc

[Guvnar]

Hi,

I have purchased a pc with windows 8 installed and a samsung 240gb SSD drive. I didn't get the windows disc with the PC and wondered how to install it onto the SSD drive. The PC is brand new so doesn't have anything else installed yet.

Any advice appreicated.

Thanks

Ian

 

[christop]

You can clone the hd.

 

[noidea_77]

Samsung provides a data migration tool to copy the hdd to the ssd: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/samsungssd/downloads.html

 

[electrontau]

An important step that new computer owner should do but rarely do it: burn recovery disks.

Once you have the disks on hand, you will always be able to reimage any drive to the original state. Extremely useful when the original drive fails and cannot be accessed.

So if you have the disks you can install windows to new SSD.

 

[wysir]

I did something like this recently with partition manager(free).

Resize the Boot partition to as small as possible. Make sure the boot partition is smaller or the same size as the destination.
Copy (Don't simply cut/paste in case of errors) the boot partition to the new drive.
Change the hard drive boot priority in Bios.
Make sure you booted to the correct drive.
Resize partitions as you wish.

On my laptop, changing the boot order still somehow kept booting from the original drive. I had to disconnect the original drive in order to get the machine to boot from the SSD. Reconnected the original drive after that and it still boots from the new drive. I kept the original boot partition on the original drive to use as a 'backup partition', so that If the new drive fails or I want an OS refresh I can just copy that original partition over.