SSD Question

Patricia’s Windows machine is almost out of disk, because I have the OS installed on a 120G SSD. I have a spare 240, but it’s been used for another OS. Do I need to wipe the bigger drive first to use it, or can I just DD the contents of the smaller one to the bigger one, and it will all be available?

[Update a while later]

OK, from what I can tell, since I’m not trying to wipe the drive, just make it all available to Windows, it looks like the way to go would be to get anything off it I want (probably nothing), format it in Windows, then dd the old drive to new?

[Update a while later]

OK, I formatted the drive in Windows, in a single NTFS volume that filled it. I copied the old OS to the newly formatted drive. It boots fine, but it only shows as 120G drive. When I use Windows disk tools to look at it, it shows half of the volume as unallocated. But it won’t let me expand it, because it’s the system disk. When I boot from the other drive to try to expand it, it simply shows it as a 240G drive. How am I supposed to recover the rest of the drive for use?

[Friday-morning update]

I didn’t update yesterday, but I rebooted with the original drive, then expanded it using the Windows tools. Unfortunately, it now refuses to boot. I get a blue screen with an error that C:\System32\Winload.efi is missing or corrupted. When I look at it, it’s exactly the same as the one on the original drive, so I suspect that it’s misdiagnosing the problem, but don’t know where to go from here. I ran chkdsk on it, but to no avail, keep getting same error message.

[Saturday-morning update]

OK, I tried again, except this time, I used the software that Lifehacker recommended. It cloned the drive, and it booted just fine. But as with dd, it cloned it so well that it made half the disk unavailable. And as before, when I used Windows disk management to expand the partition, it breaks it in such a way that it not only won’t boot, but Windows installation disk can’t fix it.

Next I’m going to try cloning only the front partitions, and then format the rest of the disk in NTFS, and copy the files from command line.

15 thoughts on “SSD Question”

  1. Your first idea will probably work (there are some unusual situations where it might not), your second idea almost certainly will work. Once you’ve transferred the contents onto the new drive and boot using the new drive, go into Disk Administrator to expand the partition/file system to include the entire drive to get the benefit of the additional space (alternately, create another partition/file system in the unused space.

  2. If Disk Management won’t work you could try the command-line tool diskpart.

    Failing that, you’ll probably need gparted or Partition Magic, based on a quick Google.

  3. Make another partition and format it. If you want to expand the partition instead you can use something like gparted live.

  4. Why not just make two partitions since you are willing to reformat anyway? Keep the C partition relatively small since it’s only used to hold the O/S and make a D partition to hold the rest and put Patricia’s home directory there. Not only will she see the increased disk space but with her being on a separate partition you can reformat C and reinstall easily if she ever gets an infection without touching her file on the other partition this should also make future migrations easier. Rather than putting everything in C which doesn’t appear to be working for you.

    1. Sorry for the grammatical errors. I punched this out quickly on an iPad and WordPress won’t let me edit an old post..

    2. I didn’t know that was possible. You’re saying that Windows would figure out how to link to her stuff on D:?

      The thing is, I already have a separate terabyte hard drive for her data, though I can’t figure out how to overmount it in her home directory, as I would with Linux. Most of what’s currently on C: is OS, and it’s running out of room.

      1. Himt use a soft link to link her home directory on C over to D. Some of the apps esp. old ones may atill improperly build user data in Windows/Program Files but most dont now.

        1. David “Soain” wrote: some bad grammatical sentences…

          Sorry for the typos, done on my iPhone w/o my reading glasses. lol…

  5. You can also modify her user account to put her home folder on the other partition. Not sure how this is done in Win8 but in Win7 you can use:

    Control Panel -> User Accounts -> Manage User Accounts ->
    Then under Users select Patricia’s account, switch to the “Advanced” tab click on the Advanced button which brings up lusrmgr, select her account again then under More Actions frame select triangle then Properties. Under Properties pop-up select the Profile Tab, then enter her home directory on the other partition in “Local Path” dialog under Home Folder.

    Whew easier done than said. Or just bring up a command line window (using cmd) and enter lusrmgr as an administrator on her machine. Should get you there just as well, then do all the actions mentioned above after lusrmgr…. Good luck…

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