Question: I’ve taken the plunge and bought an SSD and want to move my existing Windows installation over. The current hard disk is 500Gb, but I’ve trimmed the contents down to about ~40Gb. I’m transferring it across to a 100Gb SSD and looking for the easiest way just to copy everything across and set the SSD up as a boot device.
I’ve looked at a few tools like Macrium Reflect, but they don’t seem able to restore to a smaller drive. Do I need to go for something like PING to do this? I’m trying to avoid scary Linux-based boot utilities if possible, does anyone know of an easier way?
Answer: ImageX is a free tool that is part of the Windows 7 WAIK (download). ?It is what we use for imaging machines at work. It can even be used to create backups of the machine. If you’re doing the C drive (you have another drive D, and your SSD is currently set to E), then it would just be a matter of booting into Windows PE, and then
ImageX /capture c: d:image.wim “bootDrive” /verify /compress fast
That will make a very large file named image.wim on the other drive. You could even map a drive, and put it on the network, which is what we do.
Then, reconfigure the drives to make sure that the SSD is now C:.
Reboot into Windows PE again, and type:
imagex /apply d:image.wim 1 c: /verify
Then, after that, it is CRITICAL to run this command, still in PE:
bcdboot.exe c:windows
that will have it make everything bootable.
If bcdboot.exe fails you might have to mark the partition you copied Windows on as active first using the diskpart utility.
