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Dell Inspiron 3138 ssd upgrade
First time post, so forgive me as I am a novice when I comes to this stuff. My question is this: I have a dell inspiron 3138 Laptop with windows 8.1 64 bit and I would like to upgrade my hdd to an ssd drive, how might I go about doing this? The existing hdd is a 500gb 2.5 in sata. I want to put a 120gb 2.5 in ssd. Is this possible using a recovery usb or will I need to buy some kind of drive cloning software? Dell is sending me a recovery usb. Dell support said this couldn't be done but I wanted to check the forums. Thank you for your help!
y0d40n3
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March 9th, 2014 12:00
I found a solution that worked. I called dell support and they overnight shipped a dell windows 8.1 usb install flash drive, free of charge. I put the ssd drive in, booted to the usb, ran the installation and it worked. Afterward, I had to install a lot of drivers, but at least the install worked. The dell support rep said it wouldn't work because ssd is not compatible with my laptop,(that didn't make sense to me). I said just send it anyway and I'll try it. I really think dell should include the win 8 usb or disk with the computer to begin with.
ejn63
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March 6th, 2014 06:00
The Dell backup and recovery software requires a drive that is the same size or larger than the original. You may be able to do a clone of the OS partition only (but not the recovery partition - that cannot be cloned).
That said, 120G is too small for long-term use - you really need a 240 G or larger SSD.
ejn63
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March 6th, 2014 07:00
Your hard drive (or SSD) manufacturer may provide a copy of cloning software for free - start with that. You will need some means of connecting the second drive to the system while you clone the drive -- usually the easiest way is with a 2.5" external hard drive case.
y0d40n3
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March 6th, 2014 07:00
scottss7
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March 23rd, 2014 16:00
I too wanted to upgrade to a ssd and dell support said they could not help me with that. So I purchased a samsung 240 gb ssd and it came with cloning software on a cd. I hooked up an extrernal dvd and external drive caddy and ran the software and it cloned the drive popped out the old install the new ssd and works fine. I also talked to dell tech about uefi boot and told them I wanted to disable it and install linux in a dual boot and they couldn't figure out a way. I am still trying to find a way to boot from usb or any other source.
y0d40n3
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March 25th, 2014 06:00
Yeah, I tried cloning the disk with clonzilla using another computer and it didn't work for me because the the new ssd was smaller than the existing hdd. I tried a few more things but, I wasn't concerned about the data. I just wanted a fresh install on the new drive and the dell usb worked so I was happy with that. As far as booting from a linux usb. I've tried that and had limited success so far. I've read you need to disable secure boot from the bios and the linux distro you use must support uefi. I think the latest ubuntu does. The farthest I got was using arch linux as a live usb. I got to the install menu, but when I tried to run it. It just stopped and the computer became unresponsive. I had to reset the machine. I might look into it again later.