Upgrading my Alienware M17xR4 with SSD

I apologize but this may be a short answer. I do not have the time necessary for a lot of info to be posted right now, but I will post later when I get the chance.

Here is a tip:

First...BACKUP EVERYTHING IMPORTANT. Never leave anything to chance. Saved games, documents, pictures, browser bookmarks. Etc.

Second...use windows disk manager to shrink the current primary drive size down to the size of the SSD and then have both drives inserted into the system and simply clone the HDD onto the SSD.

Third...Swap the drives into correct bays and reformat the old HDD as needed for your own purposes. Most likely for data backup as you suggested.

Hope this helps :)

I shrinked my hdd as much as I could but it's still not enough. From 1 TB I could shrink it to 500 GB. Again made image, replaced one of the hdd's (bay 1) to ssd 9256 GB) and tried to restore image. Result is the same "Size of your hard drive is not supported".

Thank you for answer. I'll try to make it.

Hope it all works well for you. The sooner it gets done, the sooner you can get to enjoying your SSD.

I prefer cloning myself, as it avoids time for reinstalling, but it is good to clean install because it can help start things fresh, much the same reason its good to do a fresh reinstall once a year, for the sake of reducing clutter and other hassles. I, myself, and in the process of backing up files for a clean refresh of my system. I do too much stuff on my system, from programming to gaming to random web browsing, and all the different things I get running on my system get it so cluttered that its nice to start new once in a while.

Good Luck, and thanks for verifying Kanndy's answer :) It helps up make sure that things are getting resolved :D

Hello!

Now I have another problem  My Dell Downloads give me message "Service Tag is not supported". I get this message when pushing "Register system" button.

Pretty sure you can only use AlienRespawn if you previously used it to restore the machine and the Dell Recovery partition is still there.

AlienRespawn doesn't really have a purpose any more because you lost the original factory Restore Partition (when you swapped HDD for SSD). Now, you use Windows System Image Backup, Acronis, or something similar.

Hi!

Now I have problems installing Alienrespawn.

I made a clean installation of windows on new SSD.

Installed all drivers in correct order.

Made windows updates.

Installed Alienware programs from my Dell downloads.

Installed Alienrespawn, it starts installation, ask to restart and after restart give me message "The disk is full" and offer to deinstall itself. But the disk is not full, there's 201 GB free.

I don't know if there's easier way to do this but I did install AlienRespawn and I did create a recovery partition. So now I can tell that you are wrong, it is possible again to use AlienRespawn after loosing a recovery partition.

Hi,

is it also easy you describe with an DELL Precision M4800 (original 500GB HDD with win7pro and Office2013)? I would like to clone this to a 256GB SSD.

I will try this with Acronis and this universal restore pack...

Is it possible to clone this dell recovery partition or not?? On my System there is an dell partition FAT16 i saw and a C:\ with the Windows Installation.

Hi,

I didn't clone my HDD. Just replaced it with SSD and made clean installation of windows.

I had AlienRespawn installation file which I used to install it on my new SSD.

To clone your HDD should be easier than the way I did it.

If you have installation file of office then you can use my way if not then cloning HDD is the only way which I know.