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Want to install ssd in win 8.1 laptop

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v8440

Member
Joined
Sep 5, 2001
Hi all,

I have a new acer aspire m5 583p laptop with 8.1 factory installed. It has a 500 GB 5400 rpm hdd, which I'd like to replace with a ssd. I have no recent experience cloning drives. In fact, this is the first operating system I've had newer than xp 32 bit. I read somewhere something about win 8 machines having security features in the bios that can interfere with simply cloning a drive. I want to figure out exactly how to do this before I start the process, so if any of you have any suggestions about what program to use or how to do it, I'm all ears.
 
You may need to enable Legacy Support in BIOS.
You may need to disable secure boot, switch away from UEFI to make backups.
You may need to format the hard drive to GPT then clone all (there can be as many as five) partitions, then switch back to UEFI to be back in business.

Making partition backups is the first thing I do before starting a laptop for the first time when I buy it because one day its hard drive will die and then what? ;)
 
I have had no failures in Acronis since I have been using it (years), but I cannot argue with cheaper. Hopefully it is as user friendly as Acronis is. Always good to have choices!

Can't fight free... but Im sure C6 will!!!


PS - @ C6 - Are you still going to write that article on the differences between cloning software? Im sure a lot of readers would love to see what you come up with.
 
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Clonezilla looks like a pain in the *** to use. It may be simpler than it looks if you've done it before.
 
As long as Macrium Reflect is still available in a free version, it will continue to be my choice. Over the last few years I have tried a number of iimaging softwares. Even have a fairly recent copy although not the latest copy of Acronis they email me to move to, but so far Macrium Reflect in a free version has been my go to application for drive image and recovery. I use Win 7 so far and have no copies of Win8.1 but have worked on systems with Win8.1. The newer/est imaging software all works with Win8.1. Learning the GUI of any imaging software is a must. I prefer the looks and steps of certain software much better than others, but that is often down to personal preference and one's own time with the basic CUI of various software.
RGone...
 
I use Acronis and it's very easy to use. The thing I like about it is that it automatically resizes the partition to match the size of the new drive. Having said that there have been times when it simply would not clone. One thing that can cause this is file system errors. Acronis is smart like that. Most of the failures with Acronis have been with laptops that have restore partitions or "tools" partitions that are not formatted in NTFS like the main system partition is.

Macrium Reflect is another excellent cloning tool and there is a free version. It has the advantage over Acronis of being able to run in Windows.
 
I used clonezilla for the first time yesterday....seemed simple, checkbox next to the drive you want to clone, click next, format the target drive and click ok....7 hours later (it was a 500GB of data over USB2.0) everything worked fine, minus having to resize the partition afterwords.
 
I don't buy the part about the "more reliable than Acronis". I have been using Acronis for years, and never experienced any reliability issues.
 
Clonezilla is not very hard to use, just follow the steps carefully and you have saved yourself some bucks... save the money you'd spend on cloning software to get yourself a double-sized SSD drive.

On a mac, it's a drag-and-drop operation but in Windows, it's easy to simply boot up into Clonezill or into Linux (Like ubuntu) and type in a few little commands in the command line to clone your hard drive to an SSD.

I do not recommend using windows built-in drive-imaging backup utility, the restore function is very flaky and takes some advanced workaround to get it working correctly when it decides to give you a fit of issues.
 
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