M6600 Owners Thread

Samsung doesn't offer a cloning utility for free, they prefer selling a slightly more expensive "notebook upgrade kit" with a USB adapter and Nortron Ghost.

 

Yeah, I noticed that on Amazon, $20 more about. I found this though How to Clone Hard Drive to Smaller Drive
Instructions on what software to use, but it's two years old. What do you think? Or would you suggest something else for shrinking the partition?

 

Yeah I saw you mentioned that earlier but I found this for WD Drives

Tenchi555:

Windows disk manager or diskpart should be able to do it.
I've not used it for this purpose so others will have to help further.


Edit:
Free Trial from Acronis (You only need it once right? 30 Days Free)

Better Link to WD about Acronis True Image WD Edition Software

 

When i cloned my 64GB M4 to a 240GB Mushin Chronos deluxe for my desktop, i used diskpart and clonezilla.

Here are the commands i used in diskpart to align the SSD:

list disk
select disc # where # is the number associated to the empty SSD
create partition primary align = 1024
active

I then used a clonezilla live disc to do the actual clone.

More in depth tutorial: How To Migrate Windows 7 to a Solid State Drive - How-To Geek

Unrelated side note: cloning about 25GB worth of data from SSD to SSD on SATA III took a total of 15 minutes for the whole process most of which were setting up clonezilla.

 

Free Trial from Acronis (You only need it once right? 30 Days Free)

 

If i recall correctly, the free trial no longer offers cloning capabilities.

 

Windows can shrink the drive. Open disk management, right-click the partition, and click shrink. It will ask you how small to make it. That simple.

If there is an unmoveable file (i.e. page file) then wherever that file is will determine the minimum size you can choose. So, it might not be possible to get it down to 128 GB without using a third-party tool. (Maybe you can boot from the Windows DVD and use diskpart from the command line.)

If you can get it below 128 GB you should be able to use the Windows image process to clone the drive. Be sure to allow some breathing room (i.e. getting it down to 100 GB would be nice) because a 128 GB drive will actually show up smaller in the OS.

Once you're up and running on the smaller drive you can expand the partition to fill up any remaining space that you have. In disk management, right-click the partition and choose expand.

 

If the hibernation file and page file are in the way, you can temporarily get rid of them to partition then re-create them again.

To shrink or disable the page file, right click on computer, click on properties and the option should be in advanced system settings, advanced tab, virtual memory.

To disable the hibernation, run the command prompt as admin and type powercfg -h off. powercfg -h on to enable it again.

 

I'll only add one last thing to this good strategy: Defragment the partition first and full diskcheck. It should help.

 

~119GB, if you want the exact number, divide by 1.024^3.