I finally hopped on the solid state drive (SSD) bandwagon. Got an Intel X25-M G2 160GB drive yesterday. And ended up spending all day trying to install it. Definitely should have thought about how to go from the old drive to the new drive a bit more. But, it's working now! Unfortunately, I haven't really noticed a performance boost at all...although that might be because the only things I've done with it so far are resync my offline file cache, create silly little drawings, and write blog posts. Nothing too disk intensive there, and certainly nothing that would really benefit from the improved random access times. So I'll see how this works out in the long run.

In the mean time, this is how I migrated from the old drive to the new drive:

1. Remove encrypted (EFS) files. It turns out that for some reason I had a random encrypted file sitting around, which caused the backup procedure to fail.
2. Boot into WinPE. I used a USB drive that I've got laying around for installing Windows Server 2008 R2.
3. Use imagex (from the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK)) to capture an image of the old drive's volumes.
4. Shutdown the system & install the new drive.
5. Boot using the bootable USB drive and install Windows. I did this because I needed to create the partition structure, file systems, and configure the new drive to be bootable. Windows Setup does that all for me in a lot less time than it would take me to document/chase down all that stuff and apply the changes manually.
6. Boot using the bootable USB drive again. Quick format the OS partition (or: delete everything on it).
7. Use imagex to apply the captured image.
8. Reboot. Be happy that actually worked & didn't result in weird errors from bootmgr (or even worse, "ntldr not found"! (that would have been really bad because Windows Vista, Server 2008, 7, & Server 2008 R2 don't even *have/use* ntldr anymore!).
9. (optional) Write blog post whining about how I didn't use dd, Ghost, TruImage, some other disk cloning tool, or even just did something as simple as hooking both drives up at the same time and doing a robocopy. (note that most of those would require having both drives connected at the same time, which isn't possible for me because I don't have a computer with 2 free SATA ports...yes, it's probably time I upgraded).

Now playing: Stars – In Our Bedroom After the War – 01 The Beginning After the End