I found a nice offer this past Friday for a nice little SSD, the OCZ Agility 3 120GB at $85, plus a mail in rebate of $15, will see how that goes, I posted the form today... Anyhow, I got my little SSD and I was faced with two problems: one, how to port Windows 7 from my current SSD (a 64 GB Kingston V100) onto the new one, and second, how to port my living room OS, Windows XP, from its former host - an 120GB "traditional" hard drive, onto the Kingston SSD.
The first step proved to be rather easy both to research and to actually perform - the nice Windows 7 feature called System Image took care of all the details - I imaged my boot SSD on my secondary 1TB hard rive, then replaced the SSDs, booted from the Windows 7 installation CD and told it to "repair" the system using the system image just created. Really a let down in terms of dramatic build-up. The whole action took maybe 30 minutes including screwing the screws.
The second part proved to be a bit more challenging. First, the ubiquitous Google - I tried "system image Windows XP" and found another gem for my little bijoux collection. It is called XXClone, and comes with a freeware version, with very limited functionality. Basically, the only feature it has in the freeware version is... you guessed, cloning one hard drive onto another. Talk about lack of drama.No tension, no angst... A bit of action, though, as I had to download the little thingy, install it on my htpc and let it do its part, after I connected the SSD (I had to get a SATA data cable out of cold storage... more action!). It took about an hour to move all the data from the old hard drive to the SSD, then 2 seconds to make it bootable, and voilà! More screws to screw, and the whole thing took maybe two hours or so.
That was so much easier that I first feared. While I knew Windows 7 has that nice backup feature that can handle replacing the system hard drive with no pain only gain, it was the Windows XP one that gave me the shivers for a little while.
In the end, one word: XXClone!
