Hello,
I need some help on figuring out the proper procedures in need to do to accomplish what I'm trying to do. Any help would be very much appreciated!
I just bought a new laptop (with a standard 7200rpm 500GB hard drive with Windows 7 pre-installed). I also purchased an aftermartket 120GB solid state drive. My laptop has two hard drive bays (slots). I have also purchased Ghost 15, but have not yet installed.
1. I want to clone all of the information from the current 500GB drive to the 120 GB solid state drive and the wipe the original 500GB drive and use it for storage. The purpose of this is to run Windows and the applications that I will soon install on the solid state drive since it is much faster and use the standard hard drive for storage.
Do I simply insert the new 120GB SSD into the empty hard drive bay, install Ghost on the original 500GB drive, clone the original drive to the new drive, shutdown, take out the original drive and leave only the new SSD and make sure it boots and works as it should? Then, I would put the old drive back in and format it to use for storage. IS ALL OF THIS CORRECT?
2. Once I get everything squared away (OS/apps on SSD, empty 500GB drive for storage), then I want to take image backups of the computer at original factory settings, then I will uninstall all of the Toshiba bloatware and take another image of the computer "cleaned up", then install all of my software and take one final image with everything freshly installed. I plan on storing these 3 image backups on an external hard drive for safekeeping. DOES THIS PLAN SOUND CORRECT (ANY OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS)?
3. Since I have never used Norton Ghost before, I have a question about the installation disk that doubles as a recovery disc. I am curious about it since in the rare occurrence that something drastic happens to my computer and won't even boot to Windows, all of the backup images won't be of any use, right? Or is that the whole point of the recovery disk, to help the computer enter a recovery environment where the backups can be loaded? Also, will I have to create my own custom recovery disk after I do these images, or will the original one work?
Any answers to questions 1, 2, and/or 3 would really be helpful. I am just trying to do all of this corretly from the very beginning on a brand new computer so that I don't encounter problems later.
Thanks for your help in advance.
B