Steps:
- Make sure the 'content' on the primary drive is less than the SSD size.
- Physically reduce the primary partition to a size that is less than the SSD size. Goto control panel, search for disk partition, use the windows 7 disk manager to 'shrink' the primary disk.
Caveat: need to turn off back ups, shadow disks etc, and even do a disk de-fragmentation if necessary. In my case, the minimal shrink size is 160G after turning off back ups, even though the used size is only 30G. I used the trial version of Perfect Disk 11 to do the de-frag, and then it can be shrinked to 30G. - Back up the current system on an external hard drive. Do not use the regular back up disk to avoid pure incremental backup, which does not tak advantage of the newly partitioned smaller drive. Goto control panel and search for back up, very easy to set up.
- Burn a windows 7 recovery disk (again, search on control panel). A regular CD would suffice (only 100-200 M).
- Insert the recovery disk, disconnect the external hard drive, reboot.
- Wait until the computer boots from the recovery disk, connect the backup external hard drive, recover from there. Easy steps following the on-screen instructions.
Caveat: in case it fails, try the command line tool
> diskpart
> select disk=0
> detail disk
> clean
> exit
> exit - Reboot after everything is done. Congratulations!
Boot time decreased from 100 seconds to 50 seconds.
Lessons:
- Never try it when the primary disk is bigger than ssd disk.
- Acronis Image Tool now does not provide clone function for the trial version, don't waste your time there.
- Don't try to recover from the Factory Reset Disks. After reset, the ssd would not be bootable. Maybe a windows os disk can 'fix' it later, but I haven't tried it.
- Remember de-fragmentation in order to shrink the primary disk, especially your machine is kind of old. The disk allocation is really not that efficient.
