The Continuing Saga of the SSD

[BobH]

Finally, I'm at the point where I am ready to clone my boot partition to the SSD. I've done backups. I've moved the large user files to another drive, cleaned and defragged the boot partition increasing free space from 4.6GB to nearly 85GB. The boot partition remains at 150GB but my SSD is 250GB; so all should be well.

My question relates to mounting the SSD and doing the clone operation. My thought is that the disk containing the current boot partition must remain in place as the C: and E: drives. I have the SSD mounted in an external disk drive enclosure connected by USB3 cable. Will I be able to run the clone with Acronis and create a boot partition on the external drive (letter V:) then swap the locations of the pre-clone disk drive and the SSD? Will I be able to reassign the letter values (V: to C:, etc. after the physical swap? If so, which drive will the post swap boot come from?

TIA

[StuartR]

When you clone the drive you will erase anything on the existing SSD, including the MBR which has information about drive letters. You will not at that point have it using V: as a drive letter.

[BobH]

Thank you, Stuart!

This is my first trip down clone avenue.

[BobH]

Cue the theme to Twilight Zone:

I had a folder disappear. Seriously, it just disappeared. I am as certain as a foggy old fahrter can be that I did NOT delete it. It does not appear in the Recycle Bin.

Can anyone suggest how it might have shot myself in the foot to cause this?

A minute later:
I tried to create a new folder of the same name on the same drive partition and got a message saying that the destination already contains some folders. The folder name does not appear in File Explorer. How can an existing folder NOT display in FE? I checked CP>Folder Options> and confirmed that Show All Folders is checked and checked the View panel there to confirm that the radio button is lighted for Show Hidden files, folders and drives.

Twilight.gif

?????????
lalalala lalalala lalalala

While I'm about it, why are these folders shown in blue color?
[attachment=1]Blue.gif[/attachment]

Found the answer to this. In that same CP>Folder Options>View panel there was an option to show compressed and encrypted files in color. I turned it off and the blue went away.

[BobH]

Finally!

I have my boot partition cleaned of the big user folders and I cloned it to my SSD using DriveClone 11 from FarStone. Moving those files and cleaning up a bit of flotsam and jetsam shrank the boot partition from 233GB to 124GB. I also changed Registry entries for the folders I moved using instructions in the second half of this post. It entailed changing values in ...
HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-NNNNNNNNNNNN-100X\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders (where NNNNNNNNNNNN-100X represent real values for my system). Yes, I made backups before moving the folders, the data, and hacking the Registry.

The clone job ran for more than 6 hours!!!!!!!! This was because I chose the option to have the software create a defragmented and resized partition from the boot partition which I did not run a defrag on. I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that the DriveClone software would take care of fragmentation on the fly during the clone operation.

At this point, I have all the partitions I had before the cloning operation PLUS an SSD with the contents of the minimized boot partition on it. It occupies 64 GB. Apparently the boot partition was bloated by a lot of fragmentation.

The thing that remains is to make the SSD bootable and remove the booting capability from the boot partition C: on the hard drive. My search fu must be weak again today because I cannot find any articles that tell me how to do this. I find plenty of instruction for creating a bootable USB drive but nothing telling me how to change the boot characteristics (add or remove them) from drives. Can anyone help me with this? If you know of a wiki or web article, I'd be much obliged!

[viking33]

Finally!

I have my boot partition cleaned of the big user folders and I cloned it to my SSD using DriveClone 11 from FarStone. Moving those files and cleaning up a bit of flotsam and jetsam shrank the boot partition from 233GB to 124GB. I also changed Registry entries for the folders I moved using instructions in the second half of this post. It entailed changing values in ...
HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-NNNNNNNNNNNN-100X\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders (where NNNNNNNNNNNN-100X represent real values for my system). Yes, I made backups before moving the folders, the data, and hacking the Registry.

The clone job ran for more than 6 hours!!!!!!!! This was because I chose the option to have the software create a defragmented and resized partition from the boot partition which I did not run a defrag on. I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that the DriveClone software would take care of fragmentation on the fly during the clone operation.

At this point, I have all the partitions I had before the cloning operation PLUS an SSD with the contents of the minimized boot partition on it. It occupies 64 GB. Apparently the boot partition was bloated by a lot of fragmentation.

The thing that remains is to make the SSD bootable and remove the booting capability from the boot partition C: on the hard drive. My search fu must be weak again today because I cannot find any articles that tell me how to do this. I find plenty of instruction for creating a bootable USB drive but nothing telling me how to change the boot characteristics (add or remove them) from drives. Can anyone help me with this? If you know of a wiki or web article, I'd be much obliged!

You might want to take a look at EASEUS Partition Master Free. I have the Pro version but the free one does what I think you want to do. Change a Primary ( boot ) partition to a logical ( non boot ) partition and vice versa?

http://www.easeus.com/partition-manager ... -free.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[ChrisGreaves]

... Apparently the boot partition was bloated by a lot of fragmentation....

How can this be?
My understanding of fragmentation is that, mostly integral physical blocks are being written, and the last physical block in a sequence might be only partly-filled.
I can understand that for something like a log file where a hundred bytes are written in a fresh physical block (4KB?) for each event I'd get bloating, but I wouldn't have expected defragmentation to reduce bloat by as much as you report.
(signed) "Just Curious" of Toronto

P.S. Im happy to see that you are "on top of things" again

[BobH]

Thanks, Chris!

This post led me to question other variables in this process. I think - now - that there was a mistake in the cloning process because the resulting cloned boot partition does not have the system files it should have. The page file alone is 19GB and does not seem to exist on the partition created by the clone operation.

As they used to imply on the RoadRunner cartoons - back to the (Acme) drawing boards.

[viking33]

Thanks, Chris!

This post led me to question other variables in this process. I think - now - that there was a mistake in the cloning process because the resulting cloned boot partition does not have the system files it should have. The page file alone is 19GB and does not seem to exist on the partition created by the clone operation.

As they used to imply on the RoadRunner cartoons - back to the (Acme) drawing boards.

Have you checked out Easeus Partition Master yet?

[BobH]

[Have you checked out Easeus Partition Master yet?

Yes, I just finished doing a backup of my E: partition on the save volume as my boot partition. I'm going to remove the E: partition from that volume. The reason is that I need to shrink the boot partition but cannot do so (or so I understood from what I read) because there is no contiguous free space adjoining the boot partition. By removing the second partition from the volume, I should be able to shrink the boot partition to make it smaller than the allocation for the SSD. From what I read, shrinking a partition does not use allocated free (unused) space but must perform on the disk volume, not on the partition.

This business has a steep - and painfully acquired - learning curve.

[BobH]

Seems the saga has ended!

As Viking Bob suggested, I used EaseUS Partition Manager Professional to complete the migration process. How I managed to make it so enormously complicated and difficult I'll leave to your imagination. Suffice it to say that after using the software's Migrate OS to SSD/HDD options to choose the boot partition as the source and the SSD as the target and applying the action, the software went into what appeared to be a batch mode to complete the activities. I had chosen to have the system shut down at completion of the process. I came back to the system to find it shut down; so I disconnected the power cables from the 2 internal HDDs and the DVD before powering up. The system came up after a couple of starts and restarts.

Running diskmgmt.msc from the Start button shows that I have but one disk drive with 2 partitions, the System Reserved area and the boot partition, C:. On closer inspection it is the Crucial SSD hardware. I still have some space management to accomplish to shrink the System Reserved partition and reallocate that space to the boot partition.

It's a bit late in the day for this old fogy to be doing any other fiddling around tonight; so I'll defer other activities until the morrow. I want to reconnect power to the 3 drives and discover how they have been treated in the migration.

I still need to think my way through the ultimate location of User files and Downloads. I think I shall use the disk volume that had the boot partition on it at the beginning and create a partition that will house those folders. After creating the partition on that volume (500GB), I shall have to move the data from where it is now on the old D: partition to the new one and edit the Registry to tell the OS where those files are to be accessed and written. We shall see whether or not I can work my way through that process.

Never wanting to leave well enough alone, I'm considering setting up a RAID 5 array across 4 volumes in an external 4 disk housing that connects via USB 3. That is where I plan to place future backups of my data while using the second internal HDD for OS backups. I have a 1TB drive there and the RAID system should have a total of 2.5TB for data backups.

Thanks to all who helped me with this, especially Viking Bob. (Where is the :hatsoff: smilie?)

[viking33]

You are welcome, BobH.
Glad to see that the Easeus prog worked out for you,
I've had that for quite a while now with a few updates and it always came through for me.