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I am looking forward to adding SSD in a laptop and in a desktop both currently having single HDD each. Laptop has single partition (well apart from the Recovery and OEM) and desktop has two partitions (again apart from System Reserved). Both HDDs are significantly greater in size (used space is more as well) than the SSDs. While I understand the easiest way is to just copy the data off of the HDDs so that they have less data than the SSD size, reduce the partition size and then do partition cloning using GParted, Clonezilla or EaseUS Partition Manager. However I would like to use the partition cloning to clone only boot/system partition in case of desktop that has a rather large HDD. I would like to keep the respective HDDs in both systems without formatting them. In Desktop I would like to leave it internal and make the SSD as boot drive and in laptop I would make the HDD as an external drive via USB/eSata enclosure. I am getting inclined to use GParted/EaseUS to do this. I have gone thru this, this for GParted and this for EaseUS and many more. I have few doubts though.

  1. After the disk is cloned, the cloned disk would have same Disk ID and a machine cannot have two disks with same Disk ID. Is this true for the external USB/eSata drives as well?
  2. Is there a simpler way to change the Disk IDs of the cloned HDD? The method given in this is fine but I would like to know if there is a simpler way.
  3. How to make the SSD in the desktop as boot drive, as the machine would have two disks both having MBR and valid bootable data (in fact identical). I believe this is just a boot device priority in BIOS. Is that correct?
  4. Anything else I might have missed.

The laptop has Windows 7 and the desktop has Windows 8 RC, if that matters.

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My usual procedure was as follows...

  1. Partition the new drive
  2. Run Ghost and copy over the required partitions
  3. Run RPM (Ranish Partition Manager) again to make sure the boot part is selected
  4. BOOT INTO WINDOWS WITH ONLY THE NEW DRIVE CONNECTED
  5. Shutdown, add the old drive, deselect the boot partition on it and make sure the BIOS has the NEW drive as a higher priority drive
  6. Turn off and on...

Windows used to sort itself doing it that way. Do beware, this is all from memory. Ghost is commercial and RPM is very old.

But so am I.

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