Change system HDD to a SDD for 700-200z PC

[rrg373]

I have a HP PC Envy 700-200z. I would like to change the OEM HDD 1 GB to a 256 MB SSD. The HDD, I think, is failing. It has a Windows C: drive (Capacity:913 GB, Used: 166 GB, Free space: 746 GB), and a Recovery Image D:drive (Capacity 16.GB, Used space: 14.3 GB) - both formatted as NTFS. The PC's serial # is 2MD4170LSP, and product # is E6S60AV#ABA.

1) Which type of SSD's are recommended?

2) What is the recommended method to install a system SSD to this system?

3) How can I transfer my OEM OS and purchased apps (for some I do not have the original disks) to the new SSD disk?

4) I have a dual OS boot loader. That is, during start up I can press F9 and choose another disk to start up as a Fedora Linux system. How do I preserve or recreate that dual boot loader on the new disk?

5) The system has 8 GB. Is it worth it to upgrade to 16 GB or is it too old a system? I do not want to get a new system yet.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@rrg373 

Hello;
Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

To answer your questions ...

1) Type of SSD -- Since this PC has a standard 3.5" SATA drive, any standard 2.5" SATA SSD will do. Just avoid the M.2 SSDs, as your drive connector will not support those. Crucial has some medium-class SSDs that have good performance and are reasonably priced.

2) Install SSD, 3) Transfer Windows system -- you need to "clone" the Windows OS and associated system partitions to the SSD.  I have used a utility known as Macrium Reflect numerous times to do just this. More on this below ...

4) Fedora Linux -- turns out the cloning process used by MR simply copies the partitions, and since it does not actually read the filesystems, it will copy the Linux partitions, also, as well as the loader information.  So, if you copy ALL the partitions to the SSD, you should be good to go.

5) Personally, I would not bother.  Unless you are running processes that really stress all the cores of the PC, you would not even notice a performance gain, and would essentially, be wasting your money.

---------------- MR information ------------------------------

Since your SDD is a lot smaller, then before you do the cloning, you have to shrink the largest partition on the HDD (usually the OS partition), to the size such that it, and the other partitions, fit easily on the SSD.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB-to-Hard-Drive drive adapter (like the one illustrated below)
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk -- but select ALL the partitions, not just the ones needed to migrate Windows
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.