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Help with Vista on SSD

L

lakedude

Platinum Member
I've got an old Acer laptop with Vista that has something wrong with the hard drive or at least wrong with the software. The owner has purchased a 128GB Crucial MX100. We do not have restore disks so I'm going to try and get the system up using the restore partition (unless someone has a better idea).

What is the deal with SSDs and Vista regarding 8k thing-a-mabobs and TRIM doohickeys. I know defrag needs to be off. What else is there to know?
 
Thanks but that PDF is about physical installation. It does not have any information on partition alignment or TRIM or Vista.
 
We do not have restore disks so I'm going to try and get the system up using the restore partition (unless someone has a better idea).,restore partition..????
 
lakedude said:
Oh I was going to take the drive out and clone the recovery partition using a desktop.
Click to expand...

if in fact your old drive is smaller than the new drive it should work what space left on the new hdd that is spare you will have to go to computer management and create that free space as a partition...you can go up but not down...
 
lakedude said:
Hmm, new drive is smaller. Old drive is 160, new drive is 128ish.
Click to expand...

i tried many methods even using linux to resize the partition tried with several clone programs..as i generally are no expert at cloning..i just did a fresh install..saved all important data to a thumb drive saved my bookmarks and addons...for firefox..i dont have an answer for going down in size..maybe somebody does...try but worst case scenario it wont work you still have the hdd so u can retrieve the data from it as you made a clone of it..also you may have to update the bios for it to recognize the ssd..
 
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Make sure you align the SSD correctly, copy the recovery partition and try. The disk being smaller shouldn't matter this way.
I don't know about TRIM and Crucial does not provide any software. You already know that Vista does not support TRIM and you know you have to turn defraq off. You must find some third party software that can TRIM the disk, I don't know of any.

A link to a thread related to TRIM. You will find a link to a program and a trimcheck command.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2413778
 
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Best bet is to do a full drive clone. Install the new drive when finished, then @ 1st boot, hit F10 and do a full restore.
If you have a Windows 7 upgrade disk, you could upgrade from Vista and still keep the restore partition too.
 
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Thanks for the help!

Update:

The system lives (mostly)! The original disk was a 160GB, the new SSD is a 120 and this was not a problem.

The problem was that the boot partition on the old disk was going bad and we had no optical media. Linux clone software bombed out when it hit the bad spot. Acronis coped the bad partition but it slowed to a crawl at around the 33% mark and eventually popped up with an error. Acronis allowed me to ignore the errors but it took about 30 times longer to go the 2% from 33% to 35% (the bad spot) as it took to clone the entire rest of the drive. Acronis goofed up the diag partition so I had to go back to Linux to re-copy that partition. In all there were 3 partitions to copy, 2x diag and the main windows/boot partition.

Shrinking everything to fit was trivial with the disk out of the system. It is very hard to shrink a disk while it is running, Windows will complain about unmovable areas. Both Linux and Acronis had methods of shrinking the copy to fit on the 120. It was no problem at all.

I checked the boot partition for 4k alignment and it is fine! I guess the 4k alignment on the other 2 diag partitions doesn't really matter?

So after 7 hours of fighting with this thing I did a restore back to factory defaults and the entire Windows load went fine but in a 2nd step the Acer bloatware stopped at 8/9 and did not finish even overnight. To get the system functional I had to do Selective Startup and disable the bloatware installer.

Anyhow the system seems to be working fine but I guess there is no telling exactly which 2% of the original data has been lost...
 
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