Thread: Windows 7 backup...

Hello people,

I am planning on buying an SSD to replace my current SATA mechanical drive. Is there a way I can create an image of my entire system as it is now, then remove my old drive, install the SSD and write the image on to the new drive? This would save me a lot of time as I wouldn't have to reinstall all the programs again and reconfigure everything.



The other thing is that this is a dual boot system (Windows 7 & Debian) using Grub. The last time I tried to remove a Linux distro from my machine I couldn't get Windows to boot up after. I think I tried to also remove Grub too. I assume Windows isn't going to backup anything outside of its own operating system.

Thanks in advance.

Use Clonezilla - About for making the image and restoring it on the SSD

But i strongly recommend you to reinstall you Windows on the SSD in the proper way (there is never a bad thing to reinstall Windows)

Many times in the past when I have formatted and reinstalled, there is ALWAYS something I forget to do beforehand which means that I lose files and/or settings, which I can't remember afterwards.

If you do decide you want to clone the disk (which is what I'd do) rather than reinstalling windows, you could do what reohoie suggested, boot clonezilla from a CD or USB drive, and use it to clone from your current hard drive to your SSD in a USB enclosure (or vice versa if you want to install the SSD first). You wouldn't be able to do this without an enclosure for one of the drives though, obviously.

Alternatively, if you have a third backup drive lying around, you could use windows backup to create a system image backup, then swap out the SSD, and use your windows recovery disks to restore the system image backup to the SSD.