Upgrading Hard drive on a Solid State/Hard Drive system

[Ilander]

So, I have a i7 2600K system with a solid state disk as the boot drive, and an older (c2008) Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB drive as the data drive for programs (that I deem as not worthy of the quick load times). The hard drive has given me some errors over time, and I bought a hard disk to replace it (a Hitachi 1TB).

The issue I'm having is that the fact that Windows 7 puts a small (100MB) partition on the F3, and for some reason, even though I'm running Acronis 2012, it doesn't seem to be able to clone the F3 over to the Hitachi. I've also tried Drive XML, and for my 2 hour wait, I only managed to acquire a boot error. Thankfully, I've not done anything rash to destroy the data on the F3, but given the fact that I've seen corrupted files in Steam from that drive, I'm not will to trust it long term with my data. I really need to get the data onto that Hitachi, though...

Anyone have any advice for upgrading the HDD in a SSD/HDD system? I don't really feel like it should be so hard, especially if I've bought Acronis True Image, but maybe they haven't designed their product to handle this scenario quite yet?

Thanks for the responses...

 

[inanition02]

Are you upgrading the SSD or the HDD? The rest of your post seems to indicate the HDD.

I think you might just be better off copying the files at this point.

 

[Ilander]

Upgrading the HDD. I can copy the files, but the 100 MB boot sector partition will still be on the F3, while the data would move to the Hitachi; if I unplug the F3 at that point, or heaven forbid, format it, the system will not boot, claiming a missing MBR.

 

[inanition02]

oh, it put the MBR on the spinpoint? That's weird, usually it puts it on the boot drive.

Anyhow, there's a utility on the Windows 7 disc to re-write that. Try /FixMBR as described here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

You can also just choose to repair the installation - that should do it automatically.

 

[cadder]

If you disconnect the hard drive and turn on the computer, will it not boot fully from just the SSD? I think you could just manually copy your files from one hard drive to the other and be in good shape.

I understand that there are some forums on the Acronis website. That Win7 system restore partition causes lots of people problems with cloning, maybe you can find some answers in their forum.

 

[Ilander]

The machine won't boot without that hard disk, unfortunately...and, the acronis forums, the best advice I can seem to find is "move the hard disk to an external dock to clone." All my SATA ports are hot-swap enabled, and I did move it to a different channel, with no luck. The other thing they recommend is backing up the drive to an external drive and restoring the backup to the new drive...but, I don't have anything big enough.

I will try to move the MBR using the repair solution this evening, and I'm crossing my fingers that after that, I really can just drag and drop all the files, and rename the drive. That said, of course, it has lots of programs installed to it, so I get a little worried about the connections.

 

[inanition02]

The repair solution writes a new mbr rather than move the old. I would say try thr repair solutions with the f3 unplugged.

 

[Ilander]

Hmmm...after much gnashing of teeth, I finally did just that, rewrote the MBR properly on the SSD, without either HDD connected.

After booting, and rebooting, I connected the hdds, drag 'n' dropped the files, and changed the drive letters. Now everything seems fine except for a nearly minute long lag in starting windows, presumably while windows looks around for wherever I've hidden the user files. *sigh*....I had my boot time down to under a minute, now it's north of three.

That's a question for another day, though! Thanks for all the suggestions!

 

[Ilander]

Best answer selected by Ilander.

 

[nikorr]

This topic has been closed by Nikorr.