Swapping Laptop Drive

Origin Saint

Origin Saint

Well-Known Member
Hi all!

My HP ENVY DV6 is quite old at this point, and has completely shite battery life, mild cooling issues, lately the Windows install seems to be slowly declining, and the hard drive itself is starting to feel mighty unresponsive.

I want to keep using it for things despite it's poor battery life, as it's still a useful/mildly powerful little machine. So, on that note. I want to take it's hard drive out, and put a new SSD in and re-install the same Windows 10 license to it. That said, I'm a bit at an impasse on how to handle that. If it were a desktop, I could simply migrate things and refresh, etc... But because only one can be attached at a time and I want to keep the same Windows 10 license since I don't have another one, I'm a bit confused about how to handle it.

I also need a bit of help trying to find an SSD that fits. I need a 2.5" 9mm SSD, and I'm looking for 500-750GB.

Any help is greatly appreciated guys!
 
Or just an enclosure and make it into an external. Probably worth running Seatools on it to see if it's dying.
 
Darren said:
Probably worth running Seatools on it to see if it's dying.
Click to expand...
I'll get on that tomorrow morning.

Darren said:
Or just an enclosure and make it into an external.
Click to expand...
Gunna buy this thing: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product..._title_dp_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A29Y8OP2GPR7PE

Looks like this will be the SSD of choice: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product..._act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AFWCAAVB5W2SO

500GB isn't an exciting proposition but this thing is for college only at this point and it's better than having a borked OS with a dying HDD.
 
Origin Saint said:
I'll get on that tomorrow morning.


Gunna buy this thing: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product..._title_dp_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A29Y8OP2GPR7PE

Looks like this will be the SSD of choice: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product..._act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AFWCAAVB5W2SO

500GB isn't an exciting proposition but this thing is for college only at this point and it's better than having a borked OS with a dying HDD.
Click to expand...

I'll sell you an enclosure for $14.99 fresh off the shelf at work if you're willing to drive 12 hours. Save you a few bucks.
 
I can vouch for the Kingston UV400 series. The UV300 isn't the best (it's older).
 
Just ran all of the SeaTools tests on my laptops drive. It repeatedly fails the SMART test and the Long Generic test. Seems like it's well on it's way to being a paperweight.

On a related note, since the new drive is of smaller size, how is the cloning going to work? Would it be fine so long as the used size of the current one is less than the new one?
 
Origin Saint said:
how is the cloning going to work? Would it be fine so long as the used size of the current one is less than the new one?
Click to expand...
You'd be best off shrinking the partition to just under the usable size of the new drive. Then if you do a 1:1 clone copy, all of the data will be on the beginning of the drive and won't have any ending overlap where you could potentially lose data.
 
Currently on the laptop drive there is a 669GB C:\ and a 27.7GB recovery section. How do I handle this? Should I shrink the C:\ partition to ~460 GB to accommodate both partitions on the new drive? What would be the right procedure here?

Also, any free cloning software you guys recommend I use?

Thanks for the help!
 
Most SSD's come with a copy of a cloning software. Either a key to download and activate online, or a full cd included in the packaging.
 
If you are getting the Samsung SSD then they usually come with a Samsung Magician software cd to install to clone existing drive. If not, you can download the software.
 
Alright. I've got Samsung Magician ready to go. The drive is installed in the enclosure and attached. It is currently unallocated, I'm assuming it needs to be formatted first?
Here's my full list of questions to get through the process:
  1. I must allocate the drive shown as Disk 2 in the image below, correct?
  2. In that same image you can see the partitions of my C:\ Drive. I need to copy my C:\ including my OS and everything to the Disk 2. How do I do this? The other image is showing the drives used space for information. Do I need to only have one partition on C:\? Or do I need the Recovery D:\ partition? What about the other partitions? For shrinking the C:\ partition, I simply right click and select shrink, right?
Screenshot%208_zpsuclc18wl.png

Screenshot%207_zps6yfninxw.png
 
You really don't need the recovery partition since you have upgraded to windows 10 as you can use the media creation tool to reinstall 10 whenever you want. Which really you should do currently now anyway just take note of your activation key in case it doesn't activate. You'll get the best performance from the SSD if you do a fresh install.
 
johnb35 said:
You really don't need the recovery partition since you have upgraded to windows 10 as you can use the media creation tool to reinstall 10 whenever you want. Which really you should do currently now anyway just take note of your activation key in case it doesn't activate. You'll get the best performance from the SSD if you do a fresh install.
Click to expand...
So what do I do here? Pull the C:\ out, stick the SSD in and just use a USB stick with the creation tool on it to install? I doubt that would work, considering the Windows install for this laptop was factory and I don't have any "recovery media" of any kind.

This isn't something I've done before, as the most complex OS installation I've done is the basic install from a disk.
 
When you upgraded to windows 10, it saved a string of digits on microsoft's server. So now when you reinstall 10 and get online it should auto reactivate for you. Your recovery partition would be for the original OS that was installed on the machine when you bought it. So basically recovery partition is garbage now. Use magicjellybean keyfinder to pull your activation key out of the registry and write it down.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top