P
Paul
So the first question then, is what happened when you moved the contentsP.N said:
of the 320GB drive to the 64GB SSD.
This is my Windows 7 Acer laptop, with hard drive.
http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/3852/acerdisk.gif
The PowerQuest Partition Table Editor picture, is done with a free tool
from the former PowerQuest company which was bought out. You can download
a copy here.
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PTEDIT32.zip
Unzip that, right click "ptedit32.exe" and select "Run as administrator". If
you don't run it as administrator, it reports "error 5" when you run it.
The only value it's contributing here, is to show the recovery partition
on my laptop is type 27, or "hidden NTFS". Partition type definitions
are here, and 27 is "PQservice" in this case.
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html
Now, when you prepared the 64GB SSD, you likely didn't copy that, and
instead just copied visible partitions. That would result in up to
three partitions, such as (guessing)
SYSTEM RESERVED
C:
D:
When working with an SSD, you *always* have a backup, due to the
flaky nature of SSDs. Some of them, have a knack of "disappearing"
overnight. They don't whine about life, like a hard drive might,
before they die. Most likely reason to die, is not flash chip
wearout, but a data structure failure or a firmware bug of some
sort.
In the situation with three partitions, especially on a small SSD,
you could simply copy the files from D: to an external USB drive,
delete D:, then use your favorite partition manager (or even Disk
Management) to extend C: to the right.
If the order was like this, we'd have the "hole" problem. Moving files
off D: to a safe place, and then deleting D:, would require the
services of a real partition manager, to move C: to the left,
followed by extending the right end of C: to fill the disk.
SYSTEM RESERVED
D:
C:
The end result would look like this.
SYSTEM RESERVED
C:
You'd then copy the data from the former D: on the external drive,
as required into C:.
Now, if you'd somehow put Program folders into D:, that wouldn't
be very good, and would invalidate this plan. I don't know if
Windows 7 encourages such a practice or not. Due to the "store"
concept and "hard linking" of things, you'd think it wouldn't be
quite as easy to support properly, as it might have been in a
previous OS. Hard linking doesn't work across partitions.
With 64GB total, you don't really have the luxury of chopping it into
tiny tiny partitions, as it just tends to shoot you in the foot.
To save space on the SSD, you can disable System Restore. And the
Help menu can provide the details.
With only 64GB to work with, there isn't too much point to
running both a C: and a D:. Based on my own experience here,
I'm managing to run with a 40GB C:, but with System Restore
turned off. So you could split your partitions 40GB and 24GB for
example, but I'm not sure that's such a big win. You save a little time
on backups I suppose. Leaving it split, might speed up an AV
scan. There still might be occasions, where the small space for
C: causes a few issues.
Before doing anything though, I'd want to run chkdsk, and
see if chkdsk sees any problems. At least one partitioning
tool I use, likes to run chkdsk itself, before doing the
command you ask for.
Paul
