I presently have two WD1600JS (160Gb) SATA2 internal hard drives in my desktop computer. I plan to replace the primary hard drive with a 128Gb solid state drive (SSD). I have made a system image (Backup) using Norton Ghost 15 of my Windows XP Pro system on the secondary drive. I have received conflicting stories such as Norton Ghost will not restore an image to an SSD, and that I must do a fresh install of Windows XP. While the SSD manufacturer tells me it will work fine. I have a number of questions:
Will Norton Ghost restore the image to the new SSD?
Should the new SSD be the same capacity, or larger than my old hard drive?
Can someone explain the process, if there are issues with restoring to an SSD?
I restored my Ghost image from a 250GB partition to a 128GB SSD. Ghost worked perfectly. I would try it before trying to shrink the source partition. If it does fail, we can go from there.
You cannot use Windows XP's Diskpart or Disk Management, but you CAN use Diskpart on the Ghost SRD to shrink the XP partition since it is based on Windows Vista. If that doesn't work, you can use GParted to shrink the XP partition.
Before you decide to do any partition changes, make sure you have a valid backup! If you do need to shrink, you should defrag the partition first.
If Ghost don't work (I think it will), you can use GImageX to create a wim file (Windows Image Files). This is based on files and not sectors, so size doesn't matter.
Ghost works fine for moving XP to a SSD, I have done it myself several times.
Letting Ghost make the partition during the restore will align everything perfectly for a SSD.
But I would go ahead and shrink the partition and re-image it first, it will save you the trouble of changing drives back and forth if it doesn't work the first time.
You already have your system imaged so I would go ahead and use a free partition tool to shrink it smaller than the SSD.
I presently have two WD1600JS (160Gb) SATA2 internal hard drives in my desktop computer. I plan to replace the primary hard drive with a 128Gb solid state drive (SSD). I have made a system image (Backup) using Norton Ghost 15 of my Windows XP Pro system on the secondary drive. I have received conflicting stories such as Norton Ghost will not restore an image to an SSD, and that I must do a fresh install of Windows XP. While the SSD manufacturer tells me it will work fine. I have a number of questions:
Will Norton Ghost restore the image to the new SSD?
Should the new SSD be the same capacity, or larger than my old hard drive?
Can someone explain the process, if there are issues with restoring to an SSD?