Upgrading SSD in Laptop

imageI have a Samsung Series 7 (2012) 8G as my daily driver.  The HD in it conked out, and I replaced it with the biggest SSD that I had at the time.. 64GB.   Not quite large enough.

Rather than spend the money buying a new laptop (I want to move up to a 17” gaming laptop with at least 16G of RAM), we decided to spend $150 to get a 500G SSD.  I waited to install it till after Holidays, because I needed the laptop functional for the holidays.  I don’t trust myself with hardware upgrades.

It all went well!

Step 1:  Should probably have been back up the existing harddrive.  In the future I’d probably use Hiren’s Boot CD, and part magic, and back up to an external USB.   However, I did not.   Luckily, I had gizmo to save me.  (gizmo pictured in picture)

Step 2:  Open up the laptop (thank you Youtube) and replace the Hard Drive.  Of course, I got left with an extra screw, that I have no idea where it goes.

Step 3: Download and burn a copy of Hiren Boot CD since I couldn’t find my other copy.  Beware copycat sites.

Step 4: Use the nifty HD-to-USB gizmo, mount the old drive, boot from Hiren,  and use CloneZilla to copy it to the new one.

Clonezilla was not easy to find.  I had to choose:

  • Boot Linux
  • Exit the linux menu to get to root prompt
  • type “clonezilla” (total guess) .. it worked.

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Step 5: boot into windows and Extend the size of the NTFS partition to cover the entire drive (“Manage Disk” in start menu)

Step 6: Update windows (didn’t have space to do that before) and shortly, update Elite as well.

Step 7: Apply stickers to outside of laptop from recent trip. 

Glad I could clone it.   I have two currently active client’s VPN softwares, a bunch of client WIFI things, etc, all configured.  Didn’t want to have to redo all of that.