I have been contemplating, for quite awhile now, getting two SSDs to run my two operating systems on. And to start out my summer, I have finally Done the Deed. Woo!
I ordered two 128 GB Crucial SSDs from NewEgg and they arrived a few days later (and of course, the price dropped right after I ordered ’em). They are so teeny tiny! They’d fit nicely in a laptop, but I was putting them into my PC. (Used Scotch brand Removable Mounting Squares to stick ’em in. Well, one sticks, the other hangs cuz my power cables are a bit limited ATM.)
I started by putting a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 onto the first SSD. I’ve been using 10.04 since it came out, and 12.04 is the next Long-Term Support version. Installation was quick and easy and I soon had my first SDD ready for prime time.
I decided for Winders to try the cloning technique that the Transfer Kit (which came with the SSD) recommended. Only to discover that with the software they provided, you couldn’t clone a partition onto the drive. (My HDD had been partitioned to an Ubuntu partition of 70GB, a Winders partition of 70GB, and the remainder of the 650GB drive for data.) A bit more searching online and I found a free software that let me clone onto the SDD from just the partition.
So now I had Windows 7 on SSD, but the master boot record was screwed up on it. A bit of googling helped me figure that out, and soon I was booting into Winders. I immediately tested World of Warcrack (the main reason I have Winders on my PC) and it worked.
Today I’ve been getting e-mail & browser settings working on the new Linux install – e-mail was a bit tougher to do, but when I decided to stick with Evolution rather than switch to Thunderbird (the software that Ubuntu 12.04 ships with), it got a lot easier.
Now I’m working on spreading out the data partition of my old HDD onto the entire drive. Winders Disk Mangler has done it – sort of. It’s funny, in Windows you see that the drive is now 650GB, but in Disk Mangler, it’s in 3 pieces. All of them are labeled as drive D:, but Ubuntu has had issues seeing it. Hoping a bout with CHKDSK might cure it. (If not, I do have the drive backed up onto my external backup. I’d just prefer it to work outright.)
Regardless of how the CHKDSK goes, my two new SSDs are working great (and very fast – they’re not even as fast as they can be since my motherboard is only 3GB/s while the drives are 6GB/s). Yay for new technology! 🙂