Thinkpads Forum

Do recovery discs include the EE 2.0?

I think this would be the best option for those who want to go from HDD to SSD instead of cloning and restoring due to alignment issues.

I don't think R&R would work well when going from HDD to SSD due to alignment, am I wrong?

What other options should I consider? I know many will want to do the same thing?

Recovery disks, as far as I know, basically install the Lenovo-custom image of Windows 7 onto whatever drive is in the hard drive bay.

It's not like EE 2.0 is anything special, though- you're not missing anything if you don't 'have' it.

But the recovery disks do eliminate driver hunting after you've installed Windows 7 (unless you just copy the SWTOOLS folder from the old hard drive) and also apply the Lenovo OEM tweaks like their wallpapers and such- so it's probably the easiest way to do it.

Still, I'd either do the recovery disks or clean-install Windows 7 rather than cloning the drive.

Rescue and Recovery works great.

The instant I got my 420S, I made recovery disks and replaced the existing 128 drive with the 160SSD. The recovery disks install everything and you laptop is just as it arrive from the factory

Greg Gebhardt wrote:Rescue and Recovery works great.

The instant I got my 420S, I made recovery disks and replaced the existing 128 drive with the 160SSD. The recovery disks install everything and you laptop is just as it arrive from the factory

The problem is, there might be alignment problems?

Did you check to see if your alignment was correct?

I'd like to know the answer to this as well. I was planning on setting up the system the way I like it on the HDD, and with separate system and data partitions, then clone it to a new SSD and install it (SSD alone - taking HDD out).

In the past, HDD to HDD cloning like this has worked very well for me. Is doing this HDD => SSD really a major pain due to alignment issues?

I have deployed a few dozen SSD's successfully.

Most deployments were cloning from HDD to SSD with Acronis with never even thought of any type of alignment.

I must be missing something. Or aligning is overrated.

Brad

Brad wrote: I must be missing something. Or aligning is overrated.

Both, sorta.

There are a number of factors at play here:

1) Alignment affects different drives differently. Some (such as some drives with some Samsung, all SandForce-1xxx, and some JMicron controllers) incur a fairly hefty penalty from unaligned partitions. Others incur very little. Others still incur a decent amount, but are so fast anyways that it's hard to notice (e.g. Intel's drives.)

2) On the drives which do incur a penalty, the IO operations which are affected vary, as does the amount of performance lost.

3) With rare exceptions, anyone upgrading from a mechanical disk is likely to be so blown away by the speed of an unaligned SSD that the performance penalty might not be noticeable at all even if it is a heavy one.

BNHabs wrote:
The problem is, there might be alignment problems?

Did you check to see if your alignment was correct?

I made an mSata SSD my system drive using factory restore disks, and as far as I can tell the alignment was fine.
I don't know much about alignment, I read that the start position of each partitition needs to be divisible by 4096, and that definitely is the case.

I'm not that knowledgeable about the alignment thing since I've not used SSDs before, but I've heard about it.

But installing an OS from scratch is not a trivial undertaking. I just did this with Win7-ultimate on a T400 and I spent many hours downloading and installing ThinkVantage drivers, tools and utilities. But that isn't the half of it - restoring all apps and data and configurations in a way remotely identical to a previous install is much more work still. (I would say nearly impossible in some ways, since most "transfer tools" are only aware of a small subset of "popular applications".)

I don't know why it would be so difficult to simply create the desired partitions on the new SSD aligned with whatever sector boundaries one wishes, and then simply restore all the partition data on a partition-by-partition basis after that. You could use an image backup tool like Acronis True Image to backup, and then just do a file restore after creating the desired partitions. And if necessary, just restore the previous MBR.

Any reason why that wouldn't address the SSD alignment issue?

I'm pretty sure restoring a file-by-file (rather than a sector-by-sector) backup would preserve existing properly aligned partitions. People seem to disregard this method all the time.

Well there's undeniably a lot of convenience in taking/restoring an image backup, but seems to me that in this case since many image backup utilities now also allow file-by-file restore, as long as you create/format the required partition(s) beforehand, you could still make use of them.

The MBR/track 0 might be the biggest challenge since that might interact with disk hardware details or partition parameters, I'm rusty on exactly what info is contained there. And that might depend on whether it's the old type of BIOS partitions or the new-fangled EFI firmware/GPT partitions that modern PCs and Macs use.

Looks like Paragon Software has a $20 utility designed to migrate HDDs to SSDs which, among other things, properly aligns the new partitions:

http://www.paragon-software.com/news.ht ... &year=2011