Paragon Migrate OS to SSD [Early Adopter]
Solid State Drives are becoming increasingly popular, with prices slowly dropping and capacities increasing. It will take another few years before these new storage devices will replace conventional hard drives on most computer systems.
Still, some early adopters cannot resist the temptation and buy SSDs, despite their price tag and relatively low storage capacities. Sometimes, users buy a SSD for their old system, with the intention to replace the current hard drive the system is installed on.
Those users face a problem. How can they migrate the operating system from the old hard drive to the new and faster Solid State Drive.
Paragon Migrate OS to SSD offers a solution for those users. The software is currently in testing, and available for all early adopters at the Paragon website. All it takes is to enter some registration information and the product keys and download links will be delivered to the email account entered in the registration form.
After program installation, launch the tool using the program list in Windows start menu, or by clicking the corresponding shortcut on your desktop.
On the wizard welcome screen, read the warning about data on the second disk drive. According to the program logic, all data on this drive will be overwritten by copying data from the source drive. Before you click next, make sure you have saved any important data on the second drive to an outside source.
Clicking the Learn more link in the bottom left corner opens a program tip-window with useful information about the tool.
Click Next>, and the program analyzes the disk configuration of your computer and searches for any system volumes.
In the next screen, you will be presented with possible migration scenarios. You can either agree to perform the operation, or cancel it.
In the next window, specify which files and folders to exclude during migration. This option is very useful if you want to reduce the space you will use on the final partition, or copy the system to a smaller drive than the original one.
After migration, shutdown the computer and remove the source drive. Make the remaining drive bootable in BIOS and restart the computer. Your newly migrated system will boot after the system finishes processing.
Paragon Migrate OS to SSD will detect all operating systems installed on the hard drives automatically, and prompt the user to pick one of the systems that have been discovered.
The user is then asked to pick the target drive for the OS migration, which in this case is the SSD. If the SSD has a larger size than the data on the OS partition all data can be transferred. If the target drive has a lower size then the user is asked to select data that is then excluded from the migration.
Paragon Migrate OS to SSD's biggest strength is that it is very easy and convenient to use. In addition, users do need a deeper knowledge of partitions and system disks, as this is mostly handled by the program.
Even inexperienced users can migrate an operating system to a SSD with the program comfortably.
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So are there problems using other software to do this task?
What does this product offer that others do not?
Bill, well how many other OS migrators do you know? Are they capable of moving the OS to a smaller partition?
Off the top of my head, I would make an image of the system drive and then restore to the SSD drive on boot. Then go into the BIOS and make the SSD the boot drive. Then boot the system. Should work?
If the SSD is larger yes. If the SSD is not of the same size, then only if the program supports restoring the image to drives of different sizes. If the SSD (or hard drive partition) is smaller, then it is not working.
I just got an OCZ SSD drive for my laptop and found this s/w. I have to say, it was one of the most painless upgrades I’ve ever done. (and I’ve done a LOT)
Paragon’s s/w ran fine on my Win7 x64 system. I plugged the SSD disk into a USB-SATA controller and started up Paragon. It copied over the stuff from the live, running Win7 system. When done, I swapped the disks, booted and rebooted once to update drivers (automatically) and it was off to the races.
MUCH quicker application start, faster boot.
Thanks Paragon. Nice job.
mike