I’d been putting this off long enough, but yesterday was the day! I was going to move our Windows install to an SSD.
And I did. But you shouldn’t.
If at all possible, do a fresh re-install of Windows on your new SSD, and move your data across. Download the Windows DVD Creator (also makes USB keys), or use the “Make a recovery disk” option in Windows to blatt the installer onto an 8GB USB key, and start fresh.
So why didn’t I do that? I like a challenge, and at this point I’m just being obstinate about not re-installing.
For a short period of time in 2009, my wife worked for a company in Canada, that then got bought out by Microsoft. Like, a really short period of time – she “worked” for 3 weeks, then got 4 weeks severance… and her desk.. and her computer, which was a pretty speccy (for 2009) Dell, running Windows 7. It got case swapped, then we swapped the motherboard, then I moved it from a 750GB SATA HDD to a 2TB SATA SSHD (Hybrid HDD.. I wouldn’t recommend them frankly), and in the process moved from MBR to GPT and BIOS to uEFI, all without re-installing. At this point, we’re now in a different country, almost 8 years later, in it’s third case, second motherboard, fourth graphics card, and it’s now running Windows 10, but it hasn’t been reinstalled.
The first challenge – C:\ was a 750GB partition, and the new SSD was 500GB. Reboot into SysRescCD and use gparted to re-size – except for some reason, it couldn’t unmount it. Mess around for a few reboots, and eventually boot with the option to cache everything into memory, and we’re good – resized down to 450GB
Next challenge – the rest of the source drive isn’t empty – there’s another 750GB scratch partition, as well as two Linux partitions. This means I can’t just copy the entire disk to the new one. But I do need the GPT, EFI boot partition, and Windows partition, and they’re all in the first 500GB. Cue “dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 count=115500000”. Then load up “gdisk”, delete the entries for partitions that don’t exist, and away we go.
And it works.. until I plug the old drive back in (even after deleting the old C: drive and EFI drive with SysRescCD..). Then it stops booting.
At this point, I’m pretty sure the EFI partition and BCD is hosed, so eventually I find this article – http://www.hasper.info/repair-a-destroyed-windows-7-uefi-boot-sector/ – it works for Windows 10, thankfully, and now everything is back working again, and speedy and on an SSD.
Most people’s saturday night’s don’t involve rewriting partition tables and fixing EFI. Perhaps that mine does is a sign I’m in the right career right now, working for a SAN/NAS Vendor..