Mirror operating system

[yaofengchen]

Laptop: 8760W, 16 GB RAM, WIN7, two 500 GB hard drives.

I installed the second internal hard drive after getting the laptop.  Instaled the software mirror.  So I can boot up from either copy of the OS on the mirror.

After rebooting the laptop following software update, it crashed a couple of times.  I booted it up from the alternate copy of the OS.  Went to storage management and found the drives unsynced.  So I resynched the drive pair.  It took forever. After eight hours it is not even halfway complete.

Should I just break the mirror and do regular back up instead?

[Mumbodog]

Seems to long to me but I would be patient and let it complete, don't risk losing the other drive integrity.

[yaofengchen]

After a few hiccups it is back to normal now.  Still I am not to happy with the long startup time. This has nothing to do with the drive mirroring I don't think.  I have ordered a 256 GB SSD.  I will use it instead when it arrives.

Question again.  At the moment I have a software drive mirror (two 500 GB hard drive).  Both have the following partitions,

300 MB system,

445 GB boot, page file, crash dump (my drive letter C),

15 GB HP recovery, (my drive letter E),

5 GB blank (my drive letter F).

I can break up the drive pair E: and F:, but not drive C:.  You may ask why I want to do that, which brings up my next question. When I install the SSD using the ystem restore (restoring an image of the system which runs with the drive mirror) will I have a problem?

Should I shut down the laptop.  Physically remove the seond hard drive to break up the drive mirror.  Start up again to make sure it isrunning properly.  Back up the system and then install the SSD?

PS: I found removing the second hard drive will not start up WIN 7. I removed the 2nd hard drive and restored a prior image before the drive pair mirror.  It is working now.  Still I'd like to know how to remove the second operating system on the mirrored drive. 

[Mumbodog]

If you make your HP Recovery disc set, you don't need the Restore partition and it can be deleted.

If you run HP recovery set on the new SSD it will re-create all partitions on the new drive.

If you are using some other software to image the drive post what it is. You are best to do a clean install of Windows 7 on a SSD, when W7 installs on a SSD it optimizes the OS to work with a SSD, otherwise you will have performance issues on the new SSD, and possibly serious issues later on if you don't.

I don't know of any way to separate the partitions onto 2 drives and have them remain functional.

To remove the OS from the second drive, you would use disk mamangement to delete the OS partition on the drive. This will wipe any data on that partition, or delete all partitions and then create one big partition and format it ntfs to be used as storage space.

[yaofengchen]

Thanks for the reply.  Good thing I had a backup copy of the system image prior to when I installed the second hard drive and created the mirror.  I restored the system with that image after removing the second hard drive, breaking the mirror. 

I am going to try restoring the system to the SSD when it comes.  There are too many applications already installed I'd hate to install W7 again and all these different appications. If performance becomes a problem I'll have to deal with it later with W7 on the SSD.

[Mumbodog]

Its more than a performance hit, it can damage the SSD over time.

[yaofengchen]

I am doing a fresh install now.  The 256GB SSD came yesteray. 

Question,

In the previous system there is a 15 GB HP recovery partition.  How do I do that on the SSD?

[Mumbodog]

If you use the HP recovery media it will be created automatically, it cannot be added any other way.

[yaofengchen]

Is it not contradicting? As you suggested I should do a fresh install, not a restore. If I restore I will have the old Win7 plus all of the installed applications.  Please advise.

[Mumbodog]

You cannot create the recovery partition yourself, it can only be created by the HP recovery discs.

So no, you cannot do it. Sorry for the misunderstanding.