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tal ormanda

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Buy SSD

Plug in SSD

Clone HD to SSD

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How to pick SSD to boot to without it seeing old HD and asking which one to use? (Windows 8)

If you have truly cloned the HD to SSD, then as far as Windows is concerned they are identical and can't be told apart, so you must:

REMOVE HD

then your machine should boot from SSD correctly.

Cheers and Regards

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I had guessed that, but I never did it before. But I still want to keep the old HD (It's 2TB why wouldn't you). What would happen if theres 2 copies? Let you pick from two different versions of Windows at boot? Or how would I keep the files on the old but delete the 2nd option at boot if it did that?

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I ran into this myself once. IIRC, but I could be wrong since it's been awhile, It wouldn't boot into Windows with both drives installed, and you couldn't change anything that was helpful while booted from the old drive. I think I was able to boot into a rescue CD/DVD, while just the old drive was installed, not the new one, and then edit the drive id of the old drive to be different from that of the new drive. Then I think I formatted the old drive and reset its MBR. At that point I was able to install the new drive, boot from it, and have the old drive installed as well for data storage. Sorry I can't remember more exactly. I tried to search for instructions that would help for this situation, but my Google mojo seem to be failing me today. Hopefully someone else can point us in the right direction if you are not able to solve the problem using these sketchy directions.

Cheers and Regards

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Yeah I wanted to keep the files in tact on the old HD just in case.. I could disable it in the BIOS or set the SSD in the BIOS to boot to instead of it picking and getting confused. I'll try that when I get it.

Also is there anything I should disable the drive from doing like defrag? Not sure if it does it automatically or if I need to shut it off. EDIT: Found how to turn off defrag.

Edited by tal ormanda
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As far as I know, if you want to have the option of booting from either drive, you can either:

clone the drive, then only have installed whichever drive you wanted to boot from

or

just do a new separate install on the new drive and set it up to dual boot with the old drive.

While the second option is obviously more work, you will probably end up with a cleaner, better running, more stable system since everything will be installed fresh with no "leftovers".

If you are just concerned about getting your new drive working, after you clone the drive, leave the old drive sitting on your shelf for a week or so until you are sure that everything is working correctly before you format it for data use. In either case, once you are sure that everything is working the way you want it to, clean the new drive's files up the best you can, uninstall anything you no longer need, delete all your temp files, move appropriate files to some other data drive or whatever, minimize the page and hibernation files or delete them if appropriate, minimize the size of the Recycle Bin, get rid of old System Restore snapshots, ie do as thorough a system clean up as you can possibly do. Then go ahead and do a single manual defrag of the new disc. Then make an image file of your new system disc, which you can store on your old drive that is now converted to a data drive. You can then restore that image file back to either the SSD or any other drive at any time you need to. The image file will take up much less room than trying to maintain a "duplicate" OS, which most likely you will, hopefully, never use.

Cheers and Regards

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Since Im on a Dell I could possibly run the windows 8 install from the other drive and install fresh on the SSD.. Might do that. Which would then ask me to pick 1 of 2 version of windows 8 correct? Is there a way to hide it and only do 1. I could just set the timeout really low but I would prefer if I could just remove the one entry.

Perhaps this? http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1160/removing-a-dual-boot-in-windows/

Edited by tal ormanda
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That seems like it should work. Personally, I've used EasyBCD in the past, free for personal use. But we're quickly getting out of my comfort zone on being able to appropriately advise you. Note that once you have switched over to using your new drive, and no longer need to use the old one for booting, you should be sure that the boot loader is also on your new drive and not still left on the old one. To do so, you might have to remove the old drive temporarily and "repair" your new one using your installation media, which should clean up the boot loader on the new drive, if I remember correctly how that works. You might also be able to use EasyBCD or a similar tool to save a copy of the boot loader to copy elsewhere, I'm not sure. And I've not had to do this for Win8, I'm still on Win7, so that could throw in another wrinkle that you'll have to figure out.

Cheers and Regards

Edited by bphlpt
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