I revisited this on another PC. This time I wanted to swap the SSHD in a new PC (Lenovo Y50
) with a proper SSD. Since the SSHD was 1 TB and I felt half that would be more than adequate, I purchased a half TB SSD (Crucial M550.) Next I shrunk partitions and moved them as close as possible to the beginning of the disk. Some of that was done using a Linux Mint live boot USB as Windows puts some immovable files in the middle of the drive. After that I made sure Win 8.1 would boot. Next I tried to clone it to the SSD. With the resized and moved partitions taking aboiut 1/4 of the drive I expected no difficulty.
Acronis - no dice. When it got to the part where it needed to reboot it reported an error and Win 8.1 came up with the job unfinished. I tried this with secure boot disabled and got the same result.
Clonezilla - no dice. It's not happy going from a larger to smaller drive, even if everything should fit. There seems to be a work around reported that involves saving and restoring an image but I don't have a large enough (unused) drive available to do so.
I decided to give 'dd' a try. That's a Linux tool that makes a bit by bit copy. I knew it would try to copy the entire disk and would fail when the smaller SSD was full, but it would have copied MBR, partition table and all partitions by that time. I did that and then tried to open the drive using gparted. It complained about a missing backup partition table and exited. A little searching led me to gdisk which is capable of fixing this. I used it and was then able to open the drive using gparted.
At this point I was confident enough to open the laptop up and swap in the SSD (and replace an 8GB RAM stick with two 8GB RAM sticks.
) That did not go particularly well. Suffice to say that it is tricky to get the bottom cover off w/out breaking off a bunch of tiny plastic tabs that hold the edge of the cover along the hinge. And you have to be really careful to avoid cross threading the screws. And if you're the cautious sort who likes to unplug the battery before messing with H/W, DO NOT FORGET TO PLUG IT BACK IN BEFORE REINSTALLING THE BACK COVER.
Once past that I was very happy to find that Win8.1 boots w/out difficulty and is happy with less drive space and more RAM.
Flush with this success I grabbed my Mint live USB, booted it up and installed Linux Mint MATE. I was in heaven! I finally felt like this laptop was truly mine. I have full control of the H/W and how the S/W behaves. No more Charms that pop up when I don't want them (I never want them.) Ability to format a new hard drive. It boggles the mind that I cannot prepare a new drive for use using Win 8.1. (The disk management tool refused to do anything with my new SSD until I created a partition on it using Linux. Then it refused to use the partition but would delete and subsequently create partitions.)
Then I decided to perform one more check to see that Win8.1 could still boot. It would not. It complained about missing or wrong data and suggested I boot from recovery media or contact my vendor. Oops. I forgot to make recovery media. I'm so used to Linux where this kind of stuff is so readily available. I have a couple choices now. I could swap the SSHD back in and create recovery media. Not even considering that. I could try to figure out why I cannot boot that drive from USB. Or download recovery media from somewhere. Or create recovery media using another win8.1 system. Or find install media and just do a clean install of 8.1 (not a bad idea to get rid of the Lenovo crapware.) Perhaps I should see if I can do what I need to do using 8.1 from a VM running on Linux. That would actually be the most attractive solution for me. I would need to be able to forward my Ethernet connection to the VM.
But for the time being, I'm just going to enjoy Linux Mint on my new lappy. Maybe I'll copy the Win10 vm from the Windows disk and see if that meets my needs.
Edit: The other strategy would be go go back to the 'dd' step and copy from SSHD to SSD again. It will wipe out the Linux install but I don't have a lot of time invested in that yet. And I know it will get me a bootable Win8.1 installation and I can make recovery media before installing Linux again.
