M6600 Owners Thread

A partition is not an unallocated space. It's an allocated space.

Edit: I'm reading over at your link.

 

You're using Ghost to clone (as in image restore), it should take care of the alignment during a restore to the SSD. I think you might be reading conflicting instructions.

Edit addendum: Follow the ghost instructions since it created the image.

Edit addendum: My Physical and Logical sectors are 512 bytes formatted by windows - on Samsung PM830.

 

Actually I couldn't get ghost to work for me so I tried EaseUS.

EDIT: And when I say I couldn't get it to work, the software works, just I cant figure out how to correct clone with it. I tried several times but never managed to make the hard drive boot the OS.

 

You've got your HDD OS partition to under tijo's/aaron's recommended 119Gb size I assume. Just create an image to an external drive with windows; you could also create a partition in the remaining, i.e., unallocated portion of the HDD and store it there. Also, make a System Repair CD if you don't have one.
Let me know if you're following along with this.

 

Reading the guide, the procedure with EaseUS Partition Master should be pretty straightforward, when i used that guide, i was cloning form smaller to bigger drive, so i used clonezilla instead of EaseUS.

I just thought of something, you might need to clone the 100MB system reserved partition too (or use a repair disc to repair the boot files if you can't boot from the SSD).

 

I'm still unclear about shrinking the OS partition. My OS hard drive seems to have three separate partitions too, one is Recovery and the other has no title but I says something about OEM making me assume it has some crucial OS files. I don't know if that matters or not but all the guides I find don't show configurations like that.

 

Re-Read Aaron's post here.

Do not worry about the other partitions, they're useless. Check the size of them and subract from the 119Gb target, 1 or both of those is probably included in image. tijo said to remove your datafiles, you can store those also on external and the other partition for redundancy.
I'm going to verify with you that you have these backups and images before we start anything - it will be safe.

Create an image to an external drive right now - before shrinking anything!!!!

This is your recovery and can be restored in about 15 minutes if a mistake is made.

 

Alright, here are the details from disk management for both my desktop and my G73Jh.

Desktop:
G73:

If you look at the two screenshot, you will notice that on the SSD (disk 0 for both), there is a system reserved 118MB partition for the G73 and that there is none for the desktop. however, on the desktop, there is 101MB unallocated space on disk 1. What happened is that the system reserved partition was on disk 1. disk 1 being the disk i use for my media files is the disk that will get replaced the fastest (after a little over a year, it's already at more than 50% used), since that partition contained the boot loader, if i were to replace the disk, the desktop wouldn't boot. Since i wanted to be able to simply swap the disk when i will change it, i decided to remove the System reserved partition on disk 1. however since the boot files were there, the desktop would no longer boot. to repair the boot files, i used the method described here: Startup Repair - Windows 7 Forums.

You will have one partition where it says system in the description, that is the partition that holds the boot loader. You'll either need to clone it or repair the boot loader with the method in the link i provided.

 

tijo, Dell doesn't have System Reserved partition from the factory. Windows runs without it on them.

It will have: OEM(Hidden),Recovery(Hidden), OS

 

Good to know (+ rep), is the boot loader on the Windows partition or on another one?

The M6700 i have on order will be my first Dell so i don't know the intricacies yet.