Putting an SSD in a HP g6

[Radio Fixer]

Has anyone experience of changing from HDD in laptops to SSD?

The mechanical change over is of course a doddle but how to copy the contents of the HDD to the SSD is the tricky bit 

I suppose what I'm saying in the jargon is that I would need to image the HDD to the SSD.  The laptop came with no software to reload only a recovery section on the HDD.

On a desk top you would add the SSD as slave on a SATA split cable and then access the bios etc and then it gets fuzzy.  Played these games years ago ... 

Or should I just leave well alone?  Bought it for my wife who was and still is a PC novice and it drives me nuts waiting when I have to sort minor problems for her.  But she didn't want to spend much money on a faster machine so there we are.

thanks Gary

[Eddystonepete]

Hi Gary, instead of buying a bare SSD, buy an external SSD with a USB socket on it, then with this device plugged into your laptop, transfer all your files. After that remove the SSD from its USB housing and fit to laptop. I bought a Kingston part no SNA-DCU and did this. PC world etc. have these on special offer sometimes, often as cheap as a bare SSD.

Peter

[Radio Fixer]

Thanks Peter and I'm glad it worked for you but I'm not sure that you get a disk image that way. Maybe I can load some software onto the laptop and tell it to image to the external drive? I'm after a byte for byte copy as I don't want any lost drivers etc.

But it is a good idea in principal and one was around it.

Gary

[Nick]

Yup - you need to IMAGE your existing disk to the new SSD, and importantly, the new disk needs to be bootable.

I tend to do this by removing the drive the the laptop and plugging it and the new SSD into a desktop computer - it doesn't matter is the disks are SATA or IDE, so long, obviously, as they are the same type...

I then image the disks on the desktop, then put the now bootable SSD into the laptop and hopefully, Bob's your mother's brother.

[Radio Fixer]

Um! so you have to have 3 disks in the desktop, the one it boots from and the other two on another SATA port. Then image as you say. Obviously sound but I think I will probably just end up trying to be more patient and leave the laptop alone.

It still 'thinks' quicker than the User and she's happy.

But thanks Gary