Posted January 17, 2013 Right so i'm procrastinating my thesis, and was wondering about whether this was possible. I've seen a few websites, and they all seem to think it's a good idea. My girlfriend got me a blu-ray player for my birthday, so the blu-ray drive on my laptop is now uneccessary. i was thinking about removing it and replacing it with a SSD... Because i don't want my laptop to be out of action while i'm doing it, i was thinking about putting the SSD in the optical bay and maybe installing windows 7 on it (whilst keeping the HDD running). Then when i'm sure it's up and running, i could transfer stuff across? That probably wouldn't work would it...can you have two drives with OS's on both? All the articles i've read recommend putting the SSD in the original hard drive enclosure and putting the now spare HDD in the optical bay, but that would require wiping everything and starting afresh, and i can't really afford to do that right now. Has anyone tried anything like this? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 17, 2013 Haven't you got a spare external drive you could put things on in the interim? I'm not sure what would happen if you installed Win 7 on a second drive, booted one and then formatted it off the other when you were finished, it might muck up the boot. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 17, 2013 Yeah i've an external drive i can use, but it's not the files in particular i'm worried about - most of my stuff is backed up anyway. The thing i'm worried about is programs i need for work which are all set up correctly (Matlab/Fortran etc) which could take a while to get back working again. So i was wondering if i could keep all that stuff working on the HDD while setting up the SDD. However talking about it now makes it seem like a horrendously stupid question. It's bound to fail. Incidentally, does anyone know what connection this is? It looks like SATA but it seems too small... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18, 2013 Well i've gone and bought it now. I assumed the connection was a PATA/IDE, so we'll see how that goes... I bought a Samsung 840 120GB SSD, which seems to be a good one..... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18, 2013 Well i've gone and bought it now. I assumed the connection was a PATA/IDE, so we'll see how that goes... I bought a Samsung 840 120GB SSD, which seems to be a good one..... PATA/IDE is pin connectors rather than SATA's card connectors. I'm not terribly knowledgeable, but that doesn't look like either(I woulda guessed closer to SATA though). Could it be SCSI? I know I've seen that as a thing for a number of optical drives, I don't know if it's a protocol or an actual connection type though. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18, 2013 I didn't think it looked like either.....either, but meh. Every spec sheet i can find for my laptop and that Blu ray drive mentions Pata, so i went for that. If it doesn't fit i'll have to just try again! I found this article which looks like it will be very useful, and should allow me to migrate onto my new SSD without having to reinstall windows! http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-migrate-to-a-solid+state-drive-without-reinstalling-windows Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18, 2013 You can install Windows to your SSD while still running windows on your computer from your main hard drive. When you boot up you can change which drive to boot from. It could bugger up your programs, although in my experience I have often installed programs to a separate external hard drive and they continue to run when I take the external hard drive to another PC. Some software might be dependent on a license key being installed within the registry of your main computer though. Worst comes to worst, I imagine you could backup all your configuration files for a program like Matlab, as well as your data files. Then install the program onto your new SSD and transfer these things over. Watch out that your SSD can actually be installed on your laptop - SSDs mostly have SATA connections so check your laptop can support it (some with IDE don't have SATA). SATA 3 is best for top speeds with an SSD, but lower SATA ports will still work. You can get an IDE to SATA adapter (and vice versa), not sure what effect this will have on your transfer speeds though. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18, 2013 Well i'm using a optical drive caddy which should adapt the Sata 3 SSD to the IDE connection from my Bluray drive. Will probably give rubbish speeds, but i though that once it's all sorted i could simply swap the SSD with the HDD and get SATA 2 (i think) speeds from my normal hard drive slot and leave the HDD in the caddy to store files on. I think i'm going to try and clone my OS across rather than start afresh. Obviously not the best method, but i don't want to mess anything up! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 23, 2013 For any one who cares, that connection is apparently PATA/IDE, or at least the caddy i bought with that connection fits in my optical drive bay. Just waiting for the SSD now! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 25, 2013 Thought i would update this, because you guys deserve to know how this turned out. So the SSD arrived, and it mounted perfectly in the optical drive bay. Copied my Windows partition over to it and realigned using Gparted (following the link above). All went more or less swimmingly. Had to then download and make a Window 7 recovery USB (due to me not having a CD drive any more) and boot from that to fix the Windows SSD that now wouldn't recognise itself at a bootable drive. That done i had to fiddle around a bit, as it would keep booting from my HDD even though it was lower in the boot order. In the end i had to remove it from the boot order completely and choose the SSD one manually when starting up (hopefully i'll sort that out later). The result? An incredibly slow version of Windows 7 running off my SSD, with all the shortcuts etc trying to open off my HDD. Excellent. The PATA/IDE connection really is too slow to run a SSD through, it ends up being (twice) slower than the original HDD running through a SATA. But....it does work! So when I get home and have access to a screwdriver, i might switch them around and see what that does. Then i just have to go through and update everything so that it reads off the SSD instead of the HDD and then finally i can delete the stuff off my HDD and use it as a filedump. Woop! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 26, 2013 I am actually mildly enthralled by the progress of this story! Surprised it was IDE, it just looks so...not. Strange that it's trying to open everything off the HDD though, seems to have done the one thing you were trying to avoid and messed everything up! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 28, 2013 Oh something's gone terribly wrong now.... So i swapped the two drives round, and for a brief moment, it was all working. However, i wanted to somehow change the new dtive letter to C: so that i wouldn't have to manually change my whole system so redirect to the E: drive to work....however, that isn't possible, since you can't change the drive letter for a partition that you are booting off. So i thought i would be clever, and change my current C: drive (the old HDD) to G:, boot into the HDD, change the E: to C: and switch back again. Nope. I have no idea if that would have worked or not, because halfway through i booted into my new SSD partition, only to find that it was telling me that that copy of Windows wasn't genuine and i could do nothing but log off. Lame. Not sure what to do now. It seems i can't have two copies of Windows running at the same time (since i technically only have one license) so i'm not sure what to do now. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 28, 2013 Install a downloaded cracked copy of Windows (pre-activated). Tehnically not legal but you do actually have a valid serial for your copy so I can't see the issue. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 28, 2013 Yeah i think i may have to do that, although i'll have to start from scratch. I'm not sure if it is impossible to clone a windows partition, and have it on both drives, without it blocking one of them. I've googled around, and no-one seems to mention that you can't do it, so i might have another go at that first. Nothing with computers ever works first time does it? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 28, 2013 If you need to change the drive letter you could try booting straight into the command prompt and doing it from there, just Google the instructions beforehand because there's no GUI here so it depends on how you feel about doing it that way. Follow the instructions here: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/682-command-prompt-startup.html to boot into the Command Prompt. You need to do the first option as that will boot from the disk rather than your installation so it should allow you to change it, you can try the other options but it might not work. I'm not sure if this will confuse your Master Boot Record and make it unbootable mind you, I've got no idea if this will work. Pretty sure when I was dual booting 2 Windows install before, which ever OS I booted was assigned C:, so they were both technically the C drive depending on which one I was using. Might be different since your booting off 2 drives though. You can clone your Windows installation using something like Norton Ghost, however you still will need to delete file/programs so the file size is smaller than your SSD your cloning onto. Also you need to realign your HDD to make it work with your SSD better as it still thinks it's on a traditional HDD. (Fake edit: I see you already knew this, so never mind) In my opinion it's better to fresh install Windows on your SSD as Windows knows it's a SSD and optimizes the install and disables certain features it doesn't need. Kinda confused on what your doing, the OS and programs (if they fit on the small SSD) should be on the SSD connected via SATA (to give it the best speed, no point having a SSD if it's slow) and your personal files on a HDD. Can't you partition your HDD and move your personal files onto that and then remove the Windows partition, or move your personal files onto an external HDD? Thought you should be able to have 2 Windows installs as I thought they read the motherboard rather than the drive, but i may be wrong on that. You can try phoning Microsoft and explain your situation and they might move over the licence. And if they don't do what Sheikah said. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 29, 2013 Kinda confused on what your doing, the OS and programs (if they fit on the small SSD) should be on the SSD connected via SATA (to give it the best speed, no point having a SSD if it's slow) and your personal files on a HDD. Can't you partition your HDD and move your personal files onto that and then remove the Windows partition, or move your personal files onto an external HDD? Thought you should be able to have 2 Windows installs as I thought they read the motherboard rather than the drive, but i may be wrong on that. You can try phoning Microsoft and explain your situation and they might move over the licence. And if they don't do what Sheikah said. That's pretty much exactly what i was doing, only in long drawn out stages, as i needed to be able to work on the laptop in between stages. You were right about the double installs (or at least the problem hasn't persisted) nowhere could i find it said that you couldn't have a cloned version of windows. What i did today (after faffing about with it last night too) was to clone it all again using Clonezilla, which is a much better tool than EaseUS. The first time i did it, it tried to just clone the partition with Windows on it (my C: drive), but that wouldn't work; the cloned partition wouldn't boot. I reckon it was because it needed some files from a different (OEM) partition on the HDD. What i needed to do was clone the entire drive rather than just the partition with Windows on it. So i had to delete more stuff, and tell the Clonezilla program to ignore the fact that the clonee drive was bigger than the cloner drive, and this morning I had two identical drives. Too identical, it turned out, as they had the same drive ID, and one of them wouldn't come online. Doh! However, with some faffing they eventually sorted themselves out, and had different ID's. Anyway, i am now writing this on my laptop with my old HDD sat beside me disconnected. Success! /thread. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
