HDD and SSD

[MustangDriver]

I have a premade acer aspire that came with a 2.0TB HDD and this past weekend i bought a Kingston SSD drive for it and after i transferred the partitions from the original drive i am at a crossroad of keeping the 2.0TB drive in tact and unhooking it or formatting it and using it for storage as it has my OEM partition for windows 7 on it and i don't want to lose it, I just don't know if the cloning software transferred a working copy of the OEM partition and i DON"T want to be re-installing windows again just to find out. so far i have just about rebuilt the system after 2 years so this isn't my first time doing this but it is the first time experimenting with SSD and HDD

 

[PP Mguire]

If you used a good cloning software like Clonezilla and transferred over properly then you can unplug the 2TB and boot to the SSD like you normally would.

 

[Dauntae]

I've switched but never copied the OEM recovery partition, I just installed a fresh copy of windows with the OEM reg number. Having all the drivers is nice but downloading the newest drivers was pretty easy, On the laptop I went with the WD black swarmed drive, has a SSD built into a 1TB HD because only one HD bay in most laptops.

 

[carnageX]

Usually the recovery partition won't work anymore if you've cloned to a different HDD than what it came with.

I know that Dell did that with my buddy's Alienware - it was looking for the size of the HDD and refused to run the recovery partition because it didn't match.

Honestly you just need an OEM disc if you ever want to reinstall Windows. Or, you could take an image using CloneZilla of your current drive configuration, and keep that image backed up so that if you ever want to reinstall Windows, you can just restore that image and you're back where you were when you saved the image.

 

[MustangDriver]

Hi thanks for what insight i could get i used the cloning software that came with the drive and the only problem i had was in the bios trying to find boot drives on an OEM acer motherboard was there but tricky to find now the machine boots to desktop from windows splash screen in 15 secs i like that over the 2.0TB HDD that took almost 1m:15sec to do the same task so i guess i'll keep it as a storage drive. i definitely need to completely start over format everything and start from scratch again...maybe i am just bored but who knows