Turns out when I put them in a USB/SATA dock, they are accessible and totally readable to my new Windows 7 64-bit system. Next, I removed the RAID drives from my computer case. Make sure you got backups if you prefer to go that route. I don't know about you, but often once I've done a repartitioning, I've got a nonbootable disk. There are many options out there for cloning, but I suspect they all require changing your partition sizes so they match before you clone. With Casper, I did not have to change partition sizes or do any other screwing around with formatting or partitioning, I just cloned it. Note: the SSD is 240 GB, the hard drive's 500 GB (but with only 190 GB of data). Utterly and completely easy, brainless, and successful cloning from the Windows 7 drive to the SSD, even while working in Windows. Before trying anything else that I saw on the web, I tried Casper 7.0. Or they would clone and then be unbootable. They might clone and then stop just before finishing. None would clone from the Windows 7 hard drive to the SSD, even after formatting the SSD with 4k partitioning. I tried Acronis, Miray HDClone, Drive XML, Easus Todo. This single painful discovery wasted a lot of my time. So, I went back into RAID mode in the BIOS, the Windows 7 drive was recognized and booted up, I downloaded this MSI program from Microsoft, ran it on the Windows 7 drive, rebooted into AHCI mode and voilà - it was recognized. Turns out there's a program/driver that has to be placed on the Windows 7 drive in order for it to even be seen in Windows when switching from RAID to AHCI mode. Result: the Windows 7 hard drive was not recognized so I could not clone it to the SSD, since it did not even boot up. Of course, upon bootup I changed my BIOS from RAID to AHCI to ensure optimal SSD functionality. With the RAID drives and my SATA hard drive still unplugged, I plugged in my new SSD and put the Windows 7 hard drive into my SATA swap bay, planning to simply clone Windows 7 from the hard drive (along with installed programs and formatting) to the SSD. Hence, I didn't want to do any more fresh installs, just clones of this. See below why this matters.) I had then installed a bunch of programs and got Windows 7 formatted to just the way I wanted. I had simply disconnected the SATA and RAID drives, plugged a hard drive into my SATA bay, and installed Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium on it (note: BIOS was still in RAID mode. I had created a Windows 7 64-bit installation in anticipation of my migration.The non-RAID hard drive was a clone of the RAID system (and was bootable), plus I had a removable SATA dock with a hard drive cloned there as well (also bootable). Starting: RAID 1 with 2 500 GB disks, 1 SATA clone, 1 hot swappable SATA bay, Windows XP 32-bitĮnding: SSD in AHCI with the 2 500 GB disks each being a bootable backup clone, 1 hot swappable bay, Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium.Īnd let me save you the HOURS AND HOURS of time I spent doing trial-and-error:įirst off, I had started with Windows XP 32-bit in RAID mode in the BIOS, with 2 disks in RAID 1 and 1 other hard drive also on SATA and 1 hotswap SATA bay. Just wanted to post my experiences in Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium migration from HDD to SSD, having switched from a Windows XP RAID system. Just for sake of additional references, here are some other posts and articles that deal with the subject of migrating from a RAID 0 to SSD, or about using SSD with Win7/8 in general: Though it doesn't go into detail about migrating from a RAID, here's another Lifehacker article that deals specifically with migrating from a spinner to a solid state. You might be better off (time-wise, and performance-wise) reinstalling Windows from scratch, just be sure you clone your existing drive or backup your data. This slight difference can cause SSD's to transfer data more slowly. What is partition alignment? You can read this Lifehacker article about it, but suffice to say that SSD's start their first partition after 64 blocks whereas normal HDD's begin after 63. Partition alignment may not be optimal when you restore the image to a solid state drive, and the performance will be negatively affected. The real problem, however, is that your OS is configured expecting a raid, plus physically spinning drives. You can use Paragon Backup and Recovery Free to make a disk image of your raid 0 drives even while Windows is running it will use VSS or shadow copy to create the backup even though some files are in use.Īcronis True Image can also do this, though I haven't used it in a while.
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