Cloning an IDE Hard Drive w/Win7 on it to SATA SSD

[shane2943]

So I'm wanting to ditch the 80GB Seagate IDE Hard drive in the media PC at my church for an Intel SATA SSD. I plan to use Clonezilla to do this. To answer some questions I know I'll get in advance:

-Yes, I've used Clonezilla before and know how to use it
-Yes, the PC in question has SATA ports
-The specs of the PC in question are: Asus P7P55d system board, Corei7 Processor, 8GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1333MHz, 80 IDE OS drive with Win7 Professional on it, 1TB 7200 RPM SATA data drive, and 2 PCIe 16x 2.0 video cards.

Yes, I realize the ancient 80GB IDE HDD is the extreme bottleneck of the system, hence my desire to replace it with something a small tad faster.

I've cloned many a hard drive, but it's always been the same interface and type of drive (different sizes I've done). This time, I'm cloning to a completely different type of drive AND a different interface (IDE to SATA). Any foreseeable problems here? I'd very much like to not reload from scratch.

Thanks!

[[Admin] osborn4]

SATA drives usually require special drivers, at least in XP. I haven't played around with Win 7 yet. But if Win 7 was installed on an IDE drive, those drivers are probably not there.

You will need to set the drive to compatibility mode, rather than AHCI mode in the BIOS (I assume that's still the terminology used with SSD drives). And then install the drivers and switch back to AHCI mode for best performance.

Have fun!

[waynehoskins]

I've done that successfully on our projection PC at the church. I used the Linux dd built-in to do it. The only bump was after copying it I had to put the Windows disc in and let it fix the machine: Win7 references the partitions by UUID, which changed with the new drive, but fortunately the install disc is smart enough to figure out what happened and clear it up.

[shane2943]

Originally Posted by waynehoskins

I've done that successfully on our projection PC at the church. I used the Linux dd built-in to do it. The only bump was after copying it I had to put the Windows disc in and let it fix the machine: Win7 references the partitions by UUID, which changed with the new drive, but fortunately the install disc is smart enough to figure out what happened and clear it up.

I did some further research into this and found that cloning from an IDE > SATA appears to be hit or miss, but mostly miss. Ghost, Akronics, Clonezilla all had very mixed but very poor results. The only thing I came across that appears to work with decent repeatability is dd in Linux. I am familiar with Linux (I run 3 personal Linux systems) but have never used the dd command. I'm skerrd.

Guess I need to get to readin and learn how to use this command! I do have the Win7 Pro installation DVD at hand so if that's all it takes in addition to the clone, I'm sold. I just burned me a copy of the newest Puppy Linux, so now I have something to try 'er out with!

Thanks!

[shane2943]

Originally Posted by osborn4

You will need to set the drive to compatibility mode, rather than AHCI mode in the BIOS (I assume that's still the terminology used with SSD drives). And then install the drivers and switch back to AHCI mode for best performance.

Have fun!

I shall remember this as well. Thanks!

[waynehoskins]

The data dump command dd is simple. Usage: dd if=infile of=outfile ibs=inblksize obs=outblksize bs=blksize count=numblks conv=convertcharset

The infile would of course be the PATA source drive, and the outfile the SATA destination drive.

In this case, dd if=/dev/hdX of=/dev/sdX
Make sure to reference the entire block device (sda, hdc, etc.) not a partition (sdb1)
It may take a little while, but it should work. It'll be a bit-for-bit copy.

[blonborg]

For those without a Linux system, one can use a "Live CD (or DVD)" to do it.

I've used Knoppix to do it.

[shane2943]

Thank you, sir! Once the SSD comes in, I'm going to give 'er a shot. I'll probably use dd to create a backup image of the IDE drive first and save it to the ITB SATA data drive already in the PC. So that would be something like this I'm guessing:

dd if=/dev/HDX of=/dev/SDX/backup.img bs=64 conv=noerror

[shane2943]

Just to give an update, the clone was an absolute success! I decided to leave the SATA controller in IDE mode for two reasons: 1) I found mixed results from people setting their SATA controllers to AHCI while running SSDs -- some good, some not so good, but none good enough to justify the risk of: 2) I also found a lot of optical drives don't like AHCI one bit. Noting this, I just kept the controller set to IDE and so far so good!

The PC is BLAZINGLY fast now! The difference between the old 80GB IDE and the 80GB SSD is quite astonishing! The PC used to complete tasks pretty quick, but now it completes them RIGHT NOW.

I used the dd command from an Ubuntu live CD that I had made already to create an image of the IDE drive first. Took about 3 hours because I forgot the block size flag. *Embarrassed* The second go around was the actual clone from IDE to SSD and I used a block size of 64K. Took about 25-30 minutes. That's more like it. Checked it with fdisk -l and both drives matched. Upon first boot, Win7 installed drivers for the SSD and rebooted. Afterward, all is well! ...and FAAAAST!

Thanks all!

[Gracetech]

For future reference check out UBCD.

That is Ultimate Boot CD.

I've used it before to clone drives and while it's not user intuitive it is free.

crt

[shane2943]

I know the UBCD well. Use it almost every day. Just have never had success with its cloning tools. It's great for everything else though.