Solved Swapping out the HDD on a system with an SSD fast-boot

ultralame

Member
Member
Messages
29
I just bought an ASUS S400CA, with a 500GB 5400rpm drive and a 24GB SSD for booting.

It appears to me that the HDD is the boot drive, so the 24GB on-board SSD should not be an issue. Correct me if I am wrong.

The HDD system was partitioned approximately like this...

1) 100MB (Windows use)
2) 300MB (Windows use)
3) 128MB (hidden, windows)
4) 128GB (C: Drive, system volume)
5) 250GB (D: Drive, empty)
6) 20GB (Recovery)


I have a spare 128GB SSD, and so I did the following:

1) Created a recovery thumb drive for the laptop. Windows gave me the option to delete the last, 20GB portion, and I did.
2) Deleted the D: partition
3) Shrank the C: partittion to approx 80GB using Disk Management

I then used linux gdisk to copy the partition table of the HDD to the SSD, then used clonezilla to duplicate the 4 remaining partitions.

The laptop did not even recognize the drive for booting. Not that it could not find the boot partittion, the BIOS literally did not detect the drive. Which is STRANGE, because it obviously detected the drive when I loaded linux from a USB volume and wrote to it.

I am now running the dd tool to clone the drive, and I'll see how that works. But am I missing something? Do I have to do something special to accomplish this?

Thanks!
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win8
Thanks- I didn't think of that. But once it creates the backup file, how do I get that installed on my new drive?

Is there a way to use System Image to directly create the copy?
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win8
I did read it- the article itself mentions nothing other than how to create the image. The link you mentioned is written as "How to Do a System Image Recovery in Windows 8", and listed with 3 other related links at the bottom. I admit that it seems clear now what this means, but when I read through it the first time I thought it was a link to essentially the same type of article; That is, I read it as "How to create a System Image Recovery" instead of "How to do one".

Had the link at the bottom of the page had the same wording as the actual title, I doubt I would have missed it.

Thanks for the good information and the crappy attitude.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win8
ultralame
Could you finally boot from SSD?
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    windows8.1;OSX 10.10.3;vb with debian,ubuntu and Windows 10 TP
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Asus Vivobook S400CA
    CPU
    i5-3317U
    Memory
    8 GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    intel4000
    Hard Drives
    HDD 500GB;24GB SSD Cache
Sorry! I guess I updated elsewhere.

The dd utility did the trick. Not sure why using clonezilla did not.
I am also having S400CA-UH51T
Can you elaborate your process of dd utility? how did you do it step by step ie did you dd from any linux bootable, how did you connect SSD to system etc?
Or Can you give the link please?
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    windows8.1;OSX 10.10.3;vb with debian,ubuntu and Windows 10 TP
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Asus Vivobook S400CA
    CPU
    i5-3317U
    Memory
    8 GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    intel4000
    Hard Drives
    HDD 500GB;24GB SSD Cache
I only have a sec...

1) I used a USB3.0 adapted to hook up the new SSD drive tot he USB3 port on the laptop
2) I booted to a LIVE linux installation (I have a couple on thumb drives). I am pretty sure I was able to use the Clonezilla distro, but Ubuntu works fine too.
3) Once booted to linux, you need to figure out which disks are what. 'fdisk -l' should do this. BE VERY CAREFUL or you will HOSE your disk! (example, on linux, the main drive COULD be /dev/sda. IT's probably not, so make sure!)
4) I believe the dd command is : dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=XXX

You should look up a value for bs; this is the number of bytes it transfers at a time, too low and it will take forever. I think 32kb was what I used, but I AM NOT SURE.

This will completely overwrite the "of" disk. SO BE CAREFUL!
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win8
thanks ultralame
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    windows8.1;OSX 10.10.3;vb with debian,ubuntu and Windows 10 TP
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Asus Vivobook S400CA
    CPU
    i5-3317U
    Memory
    8 GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    intel4000
    Hard Drives
    HDD 500GB;24GB SSD Cache
Back
Top