Is it ok to ghost from a HDD to SSD?

[mebiuspower]

Hey guys,

Is it safe to run Ghost on my 320Gb HD to the Intel 160Gb SSD? Obviously used disk space is nowhere near 160Gb. Thanks.

 

[jjmIII]

yup

 

[taltamir]

no.
It will work, but it will not be properly aligned.

 

[Voo]

no.
It will work, but it will not be properly aligned.

Shouldn't that depend on the allocation size? I mean if both of them use 4k clusters why shouldn't it work?

 

[taltamir]

alignment takes more than just the SIZE of clusters into account.

 

[TheMouse]

Um, with NTFS and EXT2/3, it will be properly aligned. With FAT32/16/12, it will work fine as long as you are moving to a smaller hard drive (the SSD, in this case, would store data less efficiently than a native formatting, but no less efficient than native formatting of the larger hard drive. The problem arises when you are moving to larger hard drives.

Again, no issue for modern file systems such as NT's NTFS and Unix's EXT2/3.

 

[taltamir]

http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/

@TheMouse, simply using NTFS does not guarantee proper alignment. AFAIK that is.

And as I originally said, it will WORK, it will just be misaligned, which will lower your performance.

 

[Binky]

All of the above is basically true, except that you can fix the alignment with a gparted live boot CD. I forget the exact sequence, but basically you move your partition slightly (to the "right"), make a filler partition of an exact size to fix the alignment, move your partition back, then delete the filler partition.

It's really a lot easier than it sounds.

 

[jjmIII]

So I cant just save an image of my SSD on an old 7200 rpm drive as a back-up?

 

[mebiuspower]

All of the above is basically true, except that you can fix the alignment with a gparted live boot CD. I forget the exact sequence, but basically you move your partition slightly (to the "right"), make a filler partition of an exact size to fix the alignment, move your partition back, then delete the filler partition.

It's really a lot easier than it sounds.

Can you please provide us with more info on how this is done?

Maybe doing a fresh win7 install is more worthwhile than going through all this.

 

[subflava]

no.
It will work, but it will not be properly aligned.

This is true if you just run a simple image/clone operation. I spent many hours trying to work around this issue and was able to get it to work. Basically, you use the older diskpar.exe (not dispart.exe) utility to create the partition on the SSD. Then you use a cloning program that is able to copy a partition without having to blow away the target partitioning structure if that makes sense. In other words normally you *want* your cloning software to make an exact sector by sector copy of a drive, but in this case you *don't*. This is what took most of my time...finding a damn tool that would do this. I was able to use the Seagate Discwizard tools (which is really Acronis) to finally do this.

Of course, you could just take the easy way out and clone it normally and not worry about the misalignment. It probably won't be noticeable for you anyways. Then when you decide you want to move to Windows 7, align it properly then.

 

[subflava]

All of the above is basically true, except that you can fix the alignment with a gparted live boot CD. I forget the exact sequence, but basically you move your partition slightly (to the "right"), make a filler partition of an exact size to fix the alignment, move your partition back, then delete the filler partition.

It's really a lot easier than it sounds.

Binky - were you actually able to personally get this working? I've tried gpart a few times when messing with disk partitions, but I've found that NTFS support is very sketchy. I've found it can corrupt the NTFS partition with certain operations (can't remember the exact details of what I was doing).

 

[Elixer]

Friend formatted the SSD first, then used sysprep to prepare the system for moving to the SSD, then did xcopy for all files to the SSD, then copied the MBR, and finally setup XP again (does it automatically on first boot), and he didn't have to reinstall anything.

Note, this was going from IDE to SSD

 

[taltamir]

All of the above is basically true, except that you can fix the alignment with a gparted live boot CD. I forget the exact sequence, but basically you move your partition slightly (to the "right"), make a filler partition of an exact size to fix the alignment, move your partition back, then delete the filler partition.

It's really a lot easier than it sounds.

thanks for the info, can you post some more specifics?

 

[Binky]

Sorry, I haven't checked this post in a while.

I originally used Acronis to move an existing install onto the SSD but the partition alignment wasn't correct. I tried several times to follow somebody's directions on how to use Acronis to maintain the alignment, but it failed every time.

I found a method (link below) to fix the alignment on an SSD with 3 partitions. It's a lot simpler than it sounds when you first read the instructions. The time to complete the process depends on how much data you have on the drive.

http://www.tuxyturvy.com/blog/index...g-Windows-Partitions-Without-Losing-Data.html

 

[alexruiz]

Ghost 2003 normally doesn't copy sector by sector, so there should be no issues at all. Unless you specifically force the sector by sector switch, if you use Ghost 2003 you should be OK

 

[rmd2001]

no.
It will work, but it will not be properly aligned.

+1

It will work but I would reinstall windows and apply all SSD tweaks.