Experience moving to SSD

Last week, the manager gave the go-ahead to upgrade the machine from the HDD to SSD to all four of my colleagues including me. It helped my indignant letter about the dangers of a long compilation and Resharper’s brakes on the developer’s nerves. He told me that the launch of a studio is not a trivial exercise, and compilation and subsequent restart of ASP.NET is extremely painful.

In principle, the configuration is good, the Xeon W3503 with 4GB of memory, and the computer should fly (not in games, but in an office setting). But unfortunately, all this stuff is inhibited by the most ordinary 250 gigabyte seige. Therefore, having resolved the money issue, I began to choose the appropriate SSD. To minimize downtime, I decided to simply clone my disk. Looking at the current volume occupied, I stopped on the disc from 100GB. The local store bought SSD Corsair 115GB for $ 170 in the amount of 4 pieces and distributed to each. It would have been cheaper to take on newegg, but the time constraints implied a purchase “today,” so it took what it was. At the same time, I bought up to 8 gigabytes of memory.

So, I, as the most initiative, needed to transfer my system, as well as help my colleagues. For cloning, I used Clonezilla . To manipulate partitions, I also downloaded Gparted . And Clonezilla and Gparted need to burn a pig or flash drive, as you find it easier.

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Since I have Win 7, the Internet recommends cloning the entire disk so that all the hidden system partitions created by the Windows installer are copied. Here is the algorithm I followed:

1. Clean the original disk so that the space occupied is less than the SSD size. For example, empty the trash, delete temporary files, reduce the paging file.
2. Check the disk for fragmentation. I had 0%, and my colleague 1% had problems in the next step.
3. Reboot to Gparted, and reduce the size of the main partition to SSD size or less. I for example reduced from 235GB to 100GB. My colleague managed to reduce only to 106GB. The main thing to fit into the volume of the final disk.
4. Reboot to Windows and wait for the disk check (chkdsk) to finish automatically. Without it, there will be problems in the next step.
5. Turn off the computer, connect the SSD, and boot into Clonezilla. There you need to select device-device mode, beginner mode, disk_to_local_disk, select the correct source disk and destination disk (from HDD to SSD). Give the go-ahead to all warnings and leaning back wait 15-20 minutes (in the case of 100GB).
6. At this step, you can stop, but I wanted to have a second disk in the system for backup and just data storage. Therefore we are overloaded in Windows. The old version will be loaded, and the new disk due to collisions will be disconnected.
7. Now you need to remove the boot record of the old disk. Or shaman with bcdedit or download in Google EasyBCD . We make backup recordings just in case and take down everything that is. When you exit the program will warn you that the system will not boot the next time. We do not need.
8. Reboot the system, this time the system should boot from the new disk. Much faster.
9. Open Control Panel-Administrative Tools-Computer Management-Disk Management. Click on the old drive that is offline and select Online. A new disk appears in the system. Here you can also correct the letters of the volumes (for example, transfer the old section to the letter D).
10. You can also increase the sections to the maximum. Rebooting to GParted is not necessary for this. You can right-click on the section and select Expand Volume.

The second colleague still has XP SP2 x64, and his disk is split into two, so I could not use the above algorithm, because I could not just copy the entire disk. In addition, the size of the partition with the axis was a little less than one hundred gigabytes, so it does not need to be reduced. Therefore, for this option, this is what I did:

1. Turn off the computer, connect the SSD.
2. Enable, go to Control Panel-Administrative Tools-Computer Management-Disk management. Select a new disk, initialize it and create a new partition of exactly the same size as the one being cloned. That is, if the cloning partition is 104,855,655,624 bytes, then the new partition must be the same size. Otherwise, strange glitches got out in the cloned section (the indicated volumes in Explorer and Disk management were different) and Gparted swore at errors in NTFS, and chkdsk did not find anything.
3. Reboot to Clonezilla, select device-device mode, beginner mode, part_to_local_part mode and select the correct source and end partitions (the same volume, but on different disks). Give the go-ahead to all warnings and leaning back wait 15-20 minutes (in the case of 100GB).
4. Reboot to Clonezilla again, choose the same options from the previous step, but at the stage of selecting partitions, write off the names of the mounted disks (for example, sda for HDD, and sdb for SDD) and press Cancel until the “Enter shell command” menu appears (or something like that). Here you need to enter two magic commands:
   sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr1.img bs=446 count=1
sudo dd if=mbr1.img of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1

   where sda ​​is your original HDD, and sdb is an SDD clone. These two teams (which in principle can be combined into one) will copy the MBR from the HDD to the SSD (since the MBR was not cloned in the previous step). Also, if you have a Win XP installation disk, you can run fixmbr which will do the same (write the correct mbr).
   
5. Reboot to Gparted and increase the volume of the new partition to the volume of the disk (for example, I had an extra 10 gigabytes).
6. Reboot into the old Windows, go to Disk management, right-click on the new partition on the new disk and select Mark Partition as Active. This step can most likely be done from Clonezilla, but I don’t know how.
7. In order not to sham with boot.ini, you can boot into the BIOS and remove the old disk from the list of boot options.

That's how I updated four computers in a few hours of trial and error. Of course, if you work this procedure to shine, it will not take that much time and so many steps. But experience, as they say, is priceless. :)

Was it worth doing this upgrade?

Here is a comparison in reading speeds:



And sensations are not transferable at all, Windows starts instantly, projects are compiled twice as fast (detected), Resharper does not tupit, beauty is shorter!

UPDATE: What to do after cloning .