Help : migrating system to new disk - win7

[turtleman]

I'm kinda in trouble with the PC and I thought I'd check if the smartasses have any ideas. For the past several years?.. whenever I bought my Revo drive and GTX470 off somebody on here I've been running with that PCI-E SSD as my system drive and then a mirrored pair of conventional hd's for everything else. I've since upgraded stuff and added another mirrored pair for video storage. PC still basically works really nice aside from some things that were messed up on the mainboard from day 1 but that's a outside the matter.

My main conundrum now is that the 120Gb system drive is totally full. So I'm wondering nowadays is there any way to safely move my system data to a new drive and have it boot up and work like nothing happened or am I still stuck basically backing everything up and starting fresh? Another hurdle is that I don't have any extra PCIE slots available to stick another SSD into - one is used for the vid card and the other is the current SSD. I'm figuring i'm gonna buy another bigger SSD to replace this one.

On another note, is there a proper way to move my system referenced directories for big storage like the 'Program files' off the system drive and onto the other HD besides doing what I did which is just drag and plop it and hope the system knows what I want? It's a been a while but I seem to recall some really uncomfortable moments where initially I had no desktop icons and then they just came back and stuff like that.

Thanks for any help



PS what do you use nowadays for cleaning up disks? I wonder if a lot of what's filling up my OS drive is just garbage?

Click to read more...

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

I'm kinda in trouble with the PC and I thought I'd check if the smartasses have any ideas. For the past several years?.. whenever I bought my Revo drive and GTX470 off somebody on here I've been running with that PCI-E SSD as my system drive and then a mirrored pair of conventional hd's for everything else. I've since upgraded stuff and added another mirrored pair for video storage. PC still basically works really nice aside from some things that were messed up on the mainboard from day 1 but that's a outside the matter.

My main conundrum now is that the 120Gb system drive is totally full. So I'm wondering nowadays is there any way to safely move my system data to a new drive and have it boot up and work like nothing happened or am I still stuck basically backing everything up and starting fresh? Another hurdle is that I don't have any extra PCIE slots available to stick another SSD into - one is used for the vid card and the other is the current SSD. I'm figuring i'm gonna buy another bigger SSD to replace this one.

On another note, is there a proper way to move my system referenced directories for big storage like the 'Program files' off the system drive and onto the other HD besides doing what I did which is just drag and plop it and hope the system knows what I want?

Thanks for any help

What you are looking to do is 100% possible and you will not have to "copy" or mess with program files or have to start fresh. I just did this. Let me find the post explaining what to do.

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

Cleanup! and CCleaner for cleaning up temp and browser files across all users

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

Here is the thread with the information and links

http://www.thechicagogarage.com/for...-nerds-step-need-cloning-software-advice.html

Heres the quick rundown :

Download Clonezilla and gparted bootable DVD or USB, free software.

Plug both drives in the computer and boot from the bootable clonezilla usb or cdrom. Choose the use images option. Create an image of the old drive, restore the image to the new drive. Reboot with old drive unplugged.

Your OS should boot but it will only show 128gb (or the size of your old drive), you now need to extend the drive to use the rest of the free space. Download Gparted live CD and burn/usb and boot from it OR use windows disk management to extend the partition(Easier). When in the os, run gparted and choose the new drive and extend the partition.

Reboot and you'll now have all your storage available on the new drive.

Visual Tutorial

http://lifehacker.com/5517688/how-t...-a-spacious-new-one-and-keep-your-data-intact

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

AND BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP anything important on the OS drive before you do anything!

 

[Flyn]

I would just connect the new drive to the old computer using an inexpensive cable and copy a system image to the new drive. Swap drives then and install the system image as the new OS. Never did it but it should be simple? Maybe someone who has done this can chime in.

 

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

I would just connect the new drive to the old computer using an inexpensive cable and copy a system image to the new drive. Swap drives then and install the system image as the new OS. Never did it but it should be simple? Maybe someone who has done this can chime in.

Or just read the 4 posts above that say exactly this and the steps on how to do it

 

[turtleman]

Thanks mucho man!
While I await replacement hardware, I ran CCleaner.



About 30Gb of system temp & log files. I went ahead and removed. That should buy me some time as long as it doesn't re-populate that stuff.


Hopefully I can make Clonezilla work for me. It doesn't explicitly cover my scenario of making an image of my PCI drive and moving it to a regular sata drive and then finally putting the image onto a new pci drive but hopefully it'll be clearer once I boot the software and look at the dialog if it'll work.

 

[wombat]

holy fuck...30gigs of temp?

Also, use TreeSize to see if there's any rogue directories out there that has a bunch of stuff saved to them.

 

[Mr_Roboto]

Treesize rocks, not too surprised on 30 gigs of temp. That's Windows for ya.

 

[wombat]

TreeSize showed me that Google Chrome had two unnamed files, with no extensions, in the profile directory of my chrome profile...totaling 23 gigs. I guess it was a bug in one of their versions that created a blank file and just filled it with shit...That was fun to figure out.

 

[turtleman]

I forgot to say after CCleaner got rid of all that stuff, most of it came back in the course of a day. I was still a little better off with several gigs of space instead of dead zero but what the hell? Like 25gigs of shit just repopulated itsself?


Anyway everything's kinda screwed now because apparently I waited too long to take care of my failed everything drives and the 2nd one seems to have died today. It's mirror died about 3 months ago so they were in need of replacement as well. I already have a pair of 3TB drives to replace them but I was having trouble copying the old drive over. It was taking an impractically long time to copy in clonezilla (It was saying like 2 weeks to finish when I stopped it - it was just growing longer and longer) so i canceled it and never got any further with it. Part of that issue was I couldn't get the new mirror raid to work on the replacement drives with the same on-board intel sata controller as the old raid (which was still in broken status because it was missing the bad drive) I gather from that it can only remember one raid pair? I pulled out the one working drive from the old raid and put in the two new ones and it let me make a new raid with them but it's like it didn't really do it. Clonezilla and windows for that matter didn't show a combined disk entity - just individual unused volumes so even if I could copy the old drive to the new pair, i'd end up just wiping the recipient drive as soon as I tried to make it a mirror raid out of it (because that's how the intel controller seems to do it).


So now I actually took the drive that failed today to WeRecoverData.com to hopefully get my stuff back - everything in my life from my first PC basically is on this. One thing I've learned is fuck on-board raid controllers for data protection. My motherboard is an ASUS P8P67 and it's got an intel controller which is what I was using and also a Marvel sata controller that people say doesn't perform quite as well and frankly I have no idea how to manage it - the keys to get in there during boot don't work. Now I'm just gonna let windows manage a (pretend) raid even though performance sucks that way because it really seems easier just to treat the drives as individuals outside of the booted windows environment for cloning and whatnot. I don't really like how the rebuilding process is totally invisible either but I dunno - I've got a bad taste in my mouth about the bios raid options since they've both been worthless when the need was there.


The OP issue isn't really much of an issue anymore since the OS drive has practically nothing meaningful on it as far as I know - a few program files here and there I need but that's about it. So I'll just buy a new obviously bigger pci-e OS drive to replace it and start essentially fresh with that and the replacement 3TB drives I already have. Already possibly loosing what matters the most changes my perspective a lot.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

holy fuck...30gigs of temp?

Also, use TreeSize to see if there's any rogue directories out there that has a bunch of stuff saved to them.

there is also SpaceMonger, I have a copy on my home drive at work.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

I forgot to say after CCleaner got rid of all that stuff, most of it came back in the course of a day. I was still a little better off with several gigs of space instead of dead zero but what the hell? Like 25gigs of shit just repopulated itsself?


Anyway everything's kinda screwed now because apparently I waited too long to take care of my failed everything drives and the 2nd one seems to have died today. It's mirror died about 3 months ago so they were in need of replacement as well. I already have a pair of 3TB drives to replace them but I was having trouble copying the old drive over. It was taking an impractically long time to copy in clonezilla (It was saying like 2 weeks to finish when I stopped it - it was just growing longer and longer) so i canceled it and never got any further with it. Part of that issue was I couldn't get the new mirror raid to work on the replacement drives with the same on-board intel sata controller as the old raid (which was still in broken status because it was missing the bad drive) I gather from that it can only remember one raid pair? I pulled out the one working drive from the old raid and put in the two new ones and it let me make a new raid with them but it's like it didn't really do it. Clonezilla and windows for that matter didn't show a combined disk entity - just individual unused volumes so even if I could copy the old drive to the new pair, i'd end up just wiping the recipient drive as soon as I tried to make it a mirror raid out of it (because that's how the intel controller seems to do it).


So now I actually took the drive that failed today to WeRecoverData.com to hopefully get my stuff back - everything in my life from my first PC basically is on this. One thing I've learned is fuck on-board raid controllers for data protection. My motherboard is an ASUS P8P67 and it's got an intel controller which is what I was using and also a Marvel sata controller that people say doesn't perform quite as well and frankly I have no idea how to manage it - the keys to get in there during boot don't work. Now I'm just gonna let windows manage a (pretend) raid even though performance sucks that way because it really seems easier just to treat the drives as individuals outside of the booted windows environment for cloning and whatnot. I don't really like how the rebuilding process is totally invisible either but I dunno - I've got a bad taste in my mouth about the bios raid options since they've both been worthless when the need was there.


The OP issue isn't really much of an issue anymore since the OS drive has practically nothing meaningful on it as far as I know - a few program files here and there I need but that's about it. So I'll just buy a new obviously bigger pci-e OS drive to replace it and start essentially fresh with that and the replacement 3TB drives I already have. Already possibly loosing what matters the most changes my perspective a lot.

What you describe is the EXACT reason I run a FreeNAS server and store all my shit on the NAS.

But even that wouldn't save me if I didn't replace a drive when it dropped out of the Array.

 

[Mr_Roboto]

What you describe is the EXACT reason I run a FreeNAS server and store all my shit on the NAS.

But even that wouldn't save me if I didn't replace a drive when it dropped out of the Array.

Yup, gotta shove a new disk in when one kicks out.

 

[turtleman]

Since I'm sitting around waiting to hear from WeRecoverData about my old storage hdd I figured I'd get a new system up and going. I purchased a new pcie SSD - the intel 750 400gb one. I guess I forgot the snowball I got myself into last time and inadvertently did the exact same thing again. I figured out the new SSD I got and NVMe in general won't really work the my current motherboard sooo I bought a new board, cpu, & ram - whole new system I had no desire for - I was happy with the ability of my old system. I hope the faster ssd performance is worth it. I really just didn't want to go backwards in time when buying replacement stuff.
motherboard: ASUS Z170 pro gaming
cpu: i5 6600k
ram: crucial ballistix 2666 2x8Gb



I have no idea how WeRecoverData is supposed to actually give me the recovered data assuming they do get it - I'm on eggshells here waiting to hear from them.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Western digital will likely load the data onto a refurbished hard drive and mail that to you