First post! :smileyhappy:
I bought a new Asus X202e-dh31t netbook/notebook 11.6" touch screen which came with Windows 8 and a 500Gb hard drive. I bought an 840 Samsung 250Gb SSD which I would like to use to replace the HDD. As usual, I don't have the Windows disk(s) so I'll need to clone the existing OS over to the new SSD
I've read a LOT about this process and several others have done this on this same model computer, though I don't recall anyone using Ghost to do it. When I bought everything, I thought it would be a quick and simple process, but I've read all sorts of horror stories, several on this forum, so I figured before I really screw things up, I'd ask for advice from more knowlegeable folks - Namely, you guys
My SSD came with a product code so I could download Ghost, enter the code and use it to do the procedure. It seems in the interim, Symantec's agreement with Samsung has gone by the wayside so my product code did not work. I ordered my own single computer version of Ghost - It should arrive tomorrow
Reading the all too short cloning instructions for Ghost, it appears that what they say and what I need to do aren't exactly the same things. Since this is a single bay laptop, they say to replace the HDD with the SSD first and they give instructions for jumpering the drives so the new SSD is the master and the old HDD is the slave. All I have is a portable drive bay to mount the old HDD into and that connects with a USB cable. I bought this as a separate accessory - It didn't come with the Samsung SSD. Reading how others did this, they cloned the SSD while in the portable drive bay and then swapped the drives afterwards . . . . although, they were not using Ghost to do it. I do have another cloning program which came with the portable drive bay I bought and it suggests doing it this way but it will only clone the entire drive at once and not partition by partition as Ghost does. Since the SSD is smaller than the HDD, this didn't seem like the best way to go, so I bought the Ghost. Reading others experiences, it seems cloning a larger HDD to a smaller SSD can introduce complications, and I certainly don't need to make this any harder than it already is
Should I install the SSD in the laptop first (as Ghost suggests) and proceed from there?
My 500Gb HDD came already partitioned into an OS C: drive of 186Gb and a Data D: drive of 258Gb. There is nothing on the D drive excpet for a few Gb of pictures that I put there, so I won't need to clone that partition . . . . I can copy those over later. From what I've read, the fact that my OS drive C is smaller than my SSD is a good thing - That should mean this can be done without resizing drive C . . . . right?
Any guidance anyone would care to offer will be most welcomed at this point. Hopefully, I can give this a shot tomorrow and it will all go as planned, with hardly a hiccup . . . . but this is not usually my experience with it comes to computers, hence my apprehension . I'm anxious to be able to use my new machine - I've been holding off because I thought it would be better to clone it before I installed any anti-virus programming
Thanks in advance,
Don