I have an Asus UL30 that my wife is going to use because she needs a good laptop for the university. I'll probably replace it with another Asus but a different model. Can I take the SSD out and just install it in my new Asus (from the old one) without having to re-install Windows 7? They may or may not have the same processor, etc. but will this make a difference? Just to know if I can save time and I don't want to format the SSD for performance reasons. On a related note, how can I make a USB DOS bootable with HDD Erase? I read the instructions, but I'm still a bit lost. I'm a noob. I apologize.
ive heard that arconis can remove the system-specific windows components of a backup, so that you can restore it on a different system. but i dont know if you can do that to an active disc. you might want to look into that though.
Problem for me is that when I installed the SSD and booted the DVD Win 7, I could not format the drive. I just installed, so I don't know if I'll even be able to install the OS or reformat, since I don't have any other way to do it. Any suggestions?
If both systems are Intel and close chipset you should not have a problem but, you cannot go from Intel chipset to AMD or vice versa. Try it and if it does not boot even in safe mode then you know but, I do not think you will have a problem. Soon I hope to get a SSD too......
kubato is correct. Not far ago I replaced mother borad (Intel to ASUS), Intel processor left the same. On the first run Win 7 system loaded about 5 minutes configurin something and rebooting. At the end I got working system doing nothing by myself. 'm not sure about XP or Vista but Win 7 is cool $)
Windows initiated a Repair install to replace the Registry Entries and HAL. Though this can work it is strongly advised to perform clean install whenever changing Drives or Computers. Meaning the SSD is leaving your PC to go to your wife's laptop. You should then reformat and reinstall. This will save you many headaches in the near future. You can make an Image of your current installation and apply this to your Replacement Drive to save some time. This process does not always go smoothly so a Backup is strongly recommended.
Yes, I think I'll just do a clean install on a reformat. I need some advice on one issue related to this. When I first bought and installed the drive with Windows 7, the installer would not allow me to format the SSD. The "Format" button on the install process was not an active button, meaning that I could not press it, so when I saw "unallocated space" and I could not actually make a partition, I just went ahead and installed, and everything went fine. Now that I'm going to reformat, I want to do so with Windows 7 installation DVD, since it will (I understand) do so with TRIM and reset the SSD to default state. How can I do so with the DVD I burned from ISO if I couldn't do it the first time I installed? Sorry, again, for being such a noob.
So, if I'm understanding so far, it's not really possible to do a TRIM-based reformat of an SSD from the Windows 7 install disk and I need to use the 3rd party erase utility to restore factory performance on the drive. Is that correct?
It is recommended that you use the 3rd party utility, Any format will restore factory performance. TRIM does not really enter the picture until you start to use and abuse the drive in a windows type day to day usage. TRIM is a system that allows data to be over written without an erase first. For example, if you have the sentence, "I want to go to Mexico" saved on your SSD and you want to over write it there are two methods. 1. Erase everything and then write or 2. (TRIM) just overwrite the data without and erase 1st.
When you initially installed you said you simply clicked on "free space" so this explains the "cannot format" problem - you can't format free space only a drive which is partitioned which is what the install routine does for you. You should be able to simply delete these partitions during install and re-install Windows. You could also try Acronis but you need to restore the backup on the new computer so it correctly sets up the restore to boot and run correctly so the new computer has to either have an OS with Acronis installed or you need to make an Acronis boot disk. I think I would prefer a clean install myself.