First off, let me explain that I wasn't about to go through another clean install of Windows 7 when I just finished with one three months ago. Not gonna do it! Wouldn't be prudent, not at this critical juncture! I just hate have to reinstall everything and many times reactivate and register.
I just got this Intel 80GB and talk about an imaging nightmare. The Win7 built in imager/backup would not work. When I finally got it to image to my SSD, not sure how I did this, but eventually I got it to work, it totally screwed up the alignment of the SSD. So I got rid of this and started over. What I did, which finally worked, was to go back to my hard drive that had the OS. I booted to this and formatted the SSD making sure the alignment parameters were correct. Next I used an imaging tool called "snapshot.exe."
When I had this image, which I created from within Windows, I restored this to the SSD. It didn't touch the format, but afterwards I did have to right mouse click on the drive in the Snapshot program and make sure it was active and bootable. Next I disconnected my regular hard drives and booted to the SSD. It worked and the alignment was correct. Trim is enabled and all the other Intel SSD stuff.
After I was sure it was all OK, I shutdown and connected my two regular hard drives. I can still boot to the other hard drive by choosing boot priority in the BIOS. My new SSD remembered most of the partitions, so I was good to go. I did rename my old boot drive to something different, but I decided to keep the OS intact there in case I need to boot to it for some reason in the next few days. If you want your partitions to match what they were before, you can change drive letters on everything.
I did snapshot totally within Windows. I did try the DOS boot disk I created with the program, but it didn't find my NTFS drive that had the image, which I why I had to boot to my old OS to do the image.
I kind of lost faith in the Windows Image tool. It has a real problem if you want to restore the OS partition to a smaller physical hard drive, even though the data is small enough to fit comfortably. I also was bothered that it flaked on the alignment.
I'm going to image with Acronis and probably the Win7 tool on a regular basis. If anyone has tried, I'm curious if when you restore these images, that were taken from a properly aligned SSD, if the resulting restore is properly aligned. I don't have the nerve to test this right now.
I just got this Intel 80GB and talk about an imaging nightmare. The Win7 built in imager/backup would not work. When I finally got it to image to my SSD, not sure how I did this, but eventually I got it to work, it totally screwed up the alignment of the SSD. So I got rid of this and started over. What I did, which finally worked, was to go back to my hard drive that had the OS. I booted to this and formatted the SSD making sure the alignment parameters were correct. Next I used an imaging tool called "snapshot.exe."
When I had this image, which I created from within Windows, I restored this to the SSD. It didn't touch the format, but afterwards I did have to right mouse click on the drive in the Snapshot program and make sure it was active and bootable. Next I disconnected my regular hard drives and booted to the SSD. It worked and the alignment was correct. Trim is enabled and all the other Intel SSD stuff.
After I was sure it was all OK, I shutdown and connected my two regular hard drives. I can still boot to the other hard drive by choosing boot priority in the BIOS. My new SSD remembered most of the partitions, so I was good to go. I did rename my old boot drive to something different, but I decided to keep the OS intact there in case I need to boot to it for some reason in the next few days. If you want your partitions to match what they were before, you can change drive letters on everything.
I did snapshot totally within Windows. I did try the DOS boot disk I created with the program, but it didn't find my NTFS drive that had the image, which I why I had to boot to my old OS to do the image.
I kind of lost faith in the Windows Image tool. It has a real problem if you want to restore the OS partition to a smaller physical hard drive, even though the data is small enough to fit comfortably. I also was bothered that it flaked on the alignment.
I'm going to image with Acronis and probably the Win7 tool on a regular basis. If anyone has tried, I'm curious if when you restore these images, that were taken from a properly aligned SSD, if the resulting restore is properly aligned. I don't have the nerve to test this right now.