Trying to upgrade T400 to SSD, Recovery discs corrupted?

[gsl]

I'm in a graduate program at a foreign university and don't have access to my original Recovery Discs that I first made when I bought my T400, but before I left home I made images of every disc I thought I'd need with me. I recently found a good deal on a 128GB Crucial m4 SSD which I intend to swap for the 160GB Western Digital drive currently installed (I've got about 25GB free right now, and moving some of my music in FLAC to an external drive plus a judicious pruning of installed games should make space a non-issue). My brilliant plan was was to burn my Recovery images back to disk, install the SSD, restore the computer to its factory state (Win7 Home Premium x64) and be on my merry way.

However, it seems like something may have happened to my Recovery Disc images, as they will not successfully reinstall on the computer. The installation hangs at the exact place shown in the screenshot in this thread, and if I move the main window out of the way, a smaller popup from "iuimagex" tells me that there's something wrong with my backup files (sorry, I didn't write down the exact message). This makes no sense, as I've used the actual Recovery discs once before to restore this laptop and had no problems. I booted into Linux Mint on a flash drive and opened the Recovery images, copied all the files to a different flash drive (and edited the file that states the number of discs and their size) and tried the installation again from the start, and ran into the same problem at the same place.

I'm trying to figure out what my options are from here. I've swapped the HDD back in just so I can have a functional machine while I sort this out. One of the images I backed up from home was a retail Windows 7 Home Premium; can I use that in conjunction with the Product Key on the sticker on the bottom of this laptop (or dig up the current installation's key with some keyfinder tool)? It's not my ideal solution, since I'd be missing out on the tweaks Lenovo makes to the OS as part of the mysterious "Enhanced Experience." As a distant third option I could try to clone the HDD to the SSD after some prep work, but I'd really like that squeaky clean feeling a fresh install brings, and Master Google suggests such cloning isn't the best idea.

So has anyone else run into this issue before, or anything similar? I'm a few years out of warranty right now, so I don't think I could contact Lenovo about it, either.
Thanks!

[rjwilmsi]

You're installing Windows 7 right? I would just use the Windows 7 Backup & Restore to create a whole system image. Perform a full system backup to an external hard drive, just in case prior to changing your existing installation. Then use Windows Disk Management to reduce your primary partition so that it is less than the SSD size, move off your FLAC files etc. as needed. Then perform another backup to an external hard drive. Then install the SSD and boot off a Windows DVD and choose restore, restore from your second backup. Once in Windows on the SSD you can maximize the partition size if needed. Given that this is so easy, and foolproof as you keep your original installation backed up, I would not even worry about trying to do a clean install.

I've done this successfully on a friend's laptop, the laptop was running very slowly before the disk change, I didn't want to spend 2 days reinstalling all the programs & settings, and was pleased to find that a restore of the existing installation avoided all of that work, took only 10 minutes of my time plus waiting for the backup & restore processes (once I realized the partition size versus SSD size issue), kept the original disk intact in case of any issues and the system performance was much improved, don't think a clean install plus all programs would have been noticeably better.

Recently put a Crucial M4 128 GB in my X200s, these are good drives. Make sure you flash the SSD BIOS to the latest before doing your install, if it's on an older firmware it could otherwise have the Crucial 5000 hours bug.

[gsl]

Thanks for the advice. I didn't even think to use Windows' Backup tool because I'm so used to the pre-Windows 7 days of assuming that Microsoft utilities are junk & to find another alternative. One question, though: I have two partitions currently on my disk, a smaller one for Windows & programs, and then a larger one for user folders & general storage. How does the Backup tool handle situations like that?

And thanks for the reminder on the firmware. I bought the drive with the second-to-latest revision, and made sure to update it before I tried the restore, so I'm all good there.

[rjwilmsi]

I've only one native Windows system and it's all one C:\ partition (aside MBR etc.). However, http://winsupersite.com/windows-7/windo ... nd-restore says that if you have additional partitions the backup lets you choose which other partition(s) to include.

You'd need to ensure the total size of the partitions you choose is still less than the SSD size.

Yes, the Windows 7 Backup utility (in system image mode), and its use to restore to a blank disc was above my expectations, hence my recommendation to use it.