Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I was trying to migrate my new x230 HDD to an SSD, but I encountered several problems.

1. I used Acronis Easy Migrate and it did not copy everything exactly - FAIL!
2. I wanted to keep my Lenovo Recovery Partition so I could access it at startup anytime, using my SSD.

I would like to know several things:

1. Which software can migrate everything on my HDD exactly to an SSD?
2. Is there a way I can optimize my Lenovo Recovery Partition when/after I migrate from the HDD, so that I can still access my Lenovo Factory Settings at bootup using my SSD? The Recovery Partition seems to be about 16GB total, of which 4GB is either left or used.)

I'd love to hear some answers on this topic.

Thanks.

Clonezilla can do it I believe (I never used it). Paragon should be able to as well (demo version).

Windows 7 *can* do it in a pinch. Create backup to external, swap drives, restore backup. It should be able to also copy recovery partition so long as it has a drive letter assigned to it. BUT, windows 7 only restores to a HDD larger than the original drive (somewhat of an issue with HDD ->SSD migrations). One solution is to shrink the HDD partition to under that of the SSD and go from there.

Lenovo R&R would be a last solution. Create recovery media (USB stick, 16GB min required), swap hard drives, and restore your computer. Itll reset everything to factory conditions but I believe you cannot create another USB recovery media again (there was a hack to change a text entry value in the past, but I never got it to work reliably). But, if you have a system restore point from option #2 above, you might be able to restore your computer to its as-now configuration.

I went through this before I reinstalled Win 8 on UEFI... I used the Win 7 "create recovery image" option.

Because the SSD is smaller than the HDD, I had recover every partition manually. I did everything under CMD of Windows 8 Recovery Environment. the process is a little complicated. I followed a guide on google and messed up and restarted several times before succeeding.

the important command I used to recover the partitions is "Wbadmin". if you do some google research im sure you'll find a guide.


TBH unless you really want to keep everything, just reinstall the OS under UEFI. even if you are still using Win 7 UEFI will allow easy upgrade in the future.

good luck!

morpheus wrote:Hi,

I was trying to migrate my new x230 HDD to an SSD, but I encountered several problems.

1. I used Acronis Easy Migrate and it did not copy everything exactly - FAIL!
2. I wanted to keep my Lenovo Recovery Partition so I could access it at startup anytime, using my SSD.

I would like to know several things:

1. Which software can migrate everything on my HDD exactly to an SSD?
2. Is there a way I can optimize my Lenovo Recovery Partition when/after I migrate from the HDD, so that I can still access my Lenovo Factory Settings at bootup using my SSD? The Recovery Partition seems to be about 16GB total, of which 4GB is either left or used.)

I'd love to hear some answers on this topic.

Thanks.

Have you resolved the migration? Acronis True Image will do the work. I use it all the times and successfully migrating back and forth from/to drives with smaller/larger capacity.