Moving OS from one drive to another.

[Decerno]

Good day. I have received some mighty fine help from this forum so thank you all.

New issue: I use Windows 7 64b. Always will. Settled. I purchased a HP Pavilion Slimline s5-1110 ten years ago. I still have it, have the original receipt, and it still runs strong. However, I started thinking that, with ten years on the hard drive, it might not be a bad idea to change that out. I have the original W7 Pro product code on the shell. Today I purchased a 500 gb (more than I'll ever need) SSD.

Question: how would I transfer / download / move the W7 authorized & activated OS from my ten-year old hard drive and move it onto my new SSD?

There are some smart people out there. Surely someone knows how to do this. I thank you in advance for any help proffered.

=Tim=

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi, Tim:

Since I don't believe that you can download the W7 Pro German edition anymore, the only option I can think of would be to clone the hard drive's contents to the new 500 GB SSD.

There is free cloning software available you can use to transfer the drive's contents to the new one such as Macrium Reflect/

Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free Trial

You want the software on the left side of the page under the Backup at Home section.

If the drives are not the same storage capacity (smaller to larger, larger to smaller) you will need to perform an extra step so you either can fit the larger drive's contents to the smaller drive or not have unallocated space remaining on the new drive if you are cloning a smaller capacity hard drive to a larger one.

Macrium has a forum or helpsite for that.

For example:

cloning smaller drive to a larger drive (macrium.com)

Macrium Software | Cloning a disk with Macrium Reflect 8

You will also need a SATA to USB cable that you attach to your 2.5" SSD to do the cloning with.

Something like this...

BENFEI USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter for 2.5" HDD/SSD USB to SATA III Hard Drive Adapter: Amazon.de: Compu...

Do you have a 3.5" to 2.5" drive adapter so you can properly secure the smaller 2.5" drive where the 3.5" drive goes now?

You will need something like that as well.

[Decerno]

Hello again, Paul.  Thanks for your past help. I offer a bit more detail. I'm not interested in the German

language version of W7. My original purchase of my Pavilion s5-1110 was through a military PX, so W7 came

with English embedded. English is my native language. Looking at my resident hard drive I see I'm using 150

Gb of space, not much by some standards; I keep a lot of files in a USB storage device. The SSD that I

purchased is 500Gb so the size differential between the two is not a factor. Also, the SSD has a SATA

interface. So I'm all hooked up and ready to rock and roll. The cloning idea sounds good and I'll check that

out. Deep in my memory bank I thought I once came across a process, something official having to do with

Microsoft directly, where it was possible to use a Microsoft process / kluge to transfer the OS from one hard

drive to another so long as the motherboard was the same. Dunno. Thanks again.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Other than cloning the drive using the method I gave you; I don't know of any other way to transfer one drive's entire contents to another.

Microsoft has ended support for W7 over 3 years ago so most documentation for any other way to do that is hard to find.

You can always google it.

If you want to clean install W7 Pro instead of cloning the drive, here is the link to the W7 Pro 64-bit English ISO file.

https://download.microsoft.com/download/0/6/3/06365375-C346-4D65-87C7-EE41F55F736B/7601.24214.180801... 

The link will be good for 24 hours from the time of this reply.

Since the file is too large to fit on a standard size DVD you can use the free Rufus utility to transfer the ISO file to a USB flash drive so that it is bootable.

Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

On your PC, you would set the Rufus menu for the Partition Scheme from GPT to MBR.

You should be able to use the product key on your PC's case to install and activate Windows.

[Decerno]

Good day. Another successful outcome. Using the Macrium program I successfully cloned my hard drive to my SSD and it works like a champ! At least so far. I'm puttin' it through its paces but so far it's not missed a beat. So, Paul... thank you again. You're a resourceful guy.

I do have a question. The Macrium download said that it was a 30 day trial. I've cloned the hard drive and, looking through the Macrium information, there's not much else that I need from the program. I disabled the Macrium program in "Services" and also uncheck it in the System Configuration / Startup utility. I'm just wondering what happens after thirty days. Seems like the deed is already done. What? I won't be able to boot up after thirty days? My only other storage device is WD Elements USB drive that I use for the majority of my storage. Just wondering. Thanks again. And, by the way, I thought the word "clone" was what they called after shave in the deep south...

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

It appears that they no longer provide a free version of Macrium?

The version I use is free and perpetual and that no longer exists.

Looks like they retired it.

Macrium Reflect Free is Going Away - Ask Leo!

I guess you can just uninstall the software entirely once you are sure everything cloned successfully.

I'm going to have to find another free disk imaging/backup tool. 

I guess perhaps clone is what they say for after shave in the deep south, but since I am a Yankee, I don't know.  😊