My wife has a Dell Netbook that she loves. She carries that pink thing everywhere and simpy loves it. I personally hate it because I think its slow and honestly the screen is way to small for me. I'd like to give her some speed.

 

Anyways on to my problem. It doesn't have a CDdrive, but I did pickup a portable that runs off USB just fine. It currently has I think a 120gig 2.5" in it and of course no restore software to be found anywhere unless of course it lives on a hidden partition or something.

 

I'd like to drop in a 30gb SSD I picked up. Last time I tried to use Clonezilla or something of the sort it told me in so many words I couldn't because the partions where to small. Duh no kidding, but I was hopeing there was a way to shrink the partition to make it work. Of course it has all that custom software to run on a netbook, webcam and whatever else it came with.

 

Anyways anybody have any ideas?

1) Use Clonezilla to restore the laptop drive to a temporary spare SATA drive that is big enough.

 

2) Use Gparted or other tool to resize the partitions on the temporary SATA drive down so they will fit on the new SSD.

 

3) Use dd with the count= parameter to dd the portion of the temporary SATA drive to the new SSD.

I would suggest Acronis True Image.  In fact the last SSD I bought, came with an external USB case and a copy of Acronis.

Thanks for the ideas guys.

 

I don't have a spare SSD, but I do think I have a spare drive I could copy it to so I don't mess up my original. I suppose its worth a shot.

 

Or try Acronis which I've never used before. Would you run that app on the Laptop itsself or would you mount it in another machine as a slave and then run it against that drive?

With Acronis, you can make a boot USB.  I would boot up the laptop with that USB and make an image of the original drive (you have the option of saving it on the network...I use my unRAID server!).  Install the the SSD in the laptop, then use Acronis again to restore the image.

Thanks StevenD I'll see what I can do soon. I hope its that easy Im sure the misses would love to have an SSD in her NetBook

Thanks StevenD I'll see what I can do soon. I hope its that easy Im sure the misses would love to have an SSD in her NetBook

Someone's warming up to a major HW upgrade by softening the misses up with a minor (but noticeable) one ...  

 

Back on topic: I have used Acronis with success in the past, so +1 for that.

Thanks StevenD I'll see what I can do soon. I hope its that easy Im sure the misses would love to have an SSD in her NetBook

Someone's warming up to a major HW upgrade by softening the misses up with a minor (but noticeable) one ...  

 

Back on topic: I have used Acronis with success in the past, so +1 for that.

 

LOL, I did tell her I wanted some new fenders for my project 65 Chevy C10 Pickup earlier this week. LOL.... Opps that would be today actually. But it wasn't really my intention to butter her up with an SSD. I just hate that netbook of hers. So freaking slow IMHO.

Ok, made an image of my wifes netbook with Acronis.

Slapped in SSD drive and attempted to rebuild disk with backed up image.

All I see for options are Delete and Validate.

 

Do you have to Validate before it will allow you to restore?

Im using the USB drive to boot

 

Of course all of the restore process was done 30minutes before I had to be at work so I didn't really have a lot of time to attempt to dig around, but it didn't seem obvious.

It should be fairly obvious, if I recall correctly.  Is it possible the SSD already has a partition on it?

 

Ill look at it when I get home this afternoon.

I'm sure it is.

 

I just didn't see anything to push once I entered the screen to pick my image. I just saw a Delete and Validate button. So of course I said Validate and figured maybe you have to Validate before you can restore. Beats me 

I booted off my Acronis True Image Home USB drive and this is what came up:

 

 

Is that not what you see?

Yes when I click on the recover I browsed for my image and when I found my image the only options where

 

Validate

Delete

 

I haven't been home as of yet to play with it some more, but I will after work.

I must of been blind or clicked the wrong thing. I have it restoring as of right now. 

 

I would however like to get the original restore disk for it, but I think that is on one of the partitions I'm restoring.

 

Wish me luck