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Help adding an SSD to Win7 laptop

T

tgdc

Junior Member
HI, I have a Dell Studio 17 running OEM Windows 7 (Home Premium). It has a second drive bay so I decided to order an SSD to add some life back into it. But my wife uses this machine for ~200GB worth of photos, etc... so my plan is to install Win7 on the SSD but leave the Users folder on the HDD. (I don't want to buy a 512GB SSD just to fill with photos.) I'd like advice for the best way to do this. One thought I had was to do a clean install of Windows 7 on the SSD, then go in in recovery mode and repoint the C:/Users folder over to the equivalent folder on the HDD using mklink. If I do go this route, can I use the regular recovery media that can with the PC to do the clean install and do I need to disconnect the original HDD during the install? I'm not changing the machine/motherboard so I assume my OEM license is kosher but is there anything special I need to be aware of here? Option B might be to move the photos off of the HDD temporarily, then shrink the partitition and clone it over the the SSD. Then add the photos back and repoint using mklink. Would this work better? Is there a better way than each of these?

Thanks!
 
Breaking things down one at a time.

. One thought I had was to do a clean install of Windows 7 on the SSD, then go in in recovery mode and repoint the C:/Users folder over to the equivalent folder on the HDD using mklink
Click to expand...
Moving the Users folder is a pain in the butt, and typically causes more problems than it solves. Do you have any idea where your wife is saving photos? Simply changing the default save location would likely be easier and more productive. If she's saving to a library location (such as Pictures) then this is trivial to pull off.
If I do go this route, can I use the regular recovery media that can with the PC to do the clean install and do I need to disconnect the original HDD during the install?
Click to expand...
Did the laptop come with independent recovery media, or is it just a recovery partition on the hard drive? Independent media has been very rare for the past 3-4 years now, so it's always best to ask.

Assuming that it is independent media, then yes, recovering to the SSD should work just fine and not require any extra work or special tricks.
 
I looked in my filing cabinet where I keep all my DVDs and I don't appear to have any physical recovery media. There is a recovery partition. How to I go about doing an install in this situation? Thanks.
 
If the laptop came with any software to create recovery media, then do that. Otherwise your only options are to either do a clean install of Windows, or clone a Windows install to the SSD.
 
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