W530, trying to install on new disk

Question

The saga continues.  
Bought a W530 with Win 7 pro, and a 1TB M550 SSD.
Surprisingly, the W530 came with 4 recovery disks (my W520 didnt)
I put in the new SSD, and proceded to install from the disks.  It took a good 2 hours.  I was dreaming that it would just install the os an divers, not the uninstallable crap ware it shiped with, nor the usless recovery partition space waster.
When it had finished I got a shock - it installed windows 8 - the (in my oppinion) most unsable (desktop) OS MS has produced so far.  I would have settled for Win 7 with Lenovo bloatware.
Back to the drawing board.
So Now I am going to have to reinstll the orignial disk, and run the app in the control panel which creates recovery disks, and try installing with them. I pray this yields Windows 7.  Anyone know this?
If this fails, anyone know what the recovery partition is for, and if there is any way to use it to install on a new disk?
My last option then is to install Windows on its own downloaded form here: then spend hours finding and installing the drivers.
I guess another option would be to purchase some SW to clone the internal HD, but this has 3 partitions, recovery, main and hibernate.  The new HD is larger, so i dont know how to
get rid of the usless recovery partition
make the main the whole size of the new HD
keep the hibernate partition.
Has anyone done anything like this (i.e buy a lenovo with win 7 and move to a bigger disk), and say how they did it?
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Answer 1

eos wrote: 7 and move to a bigger disk), and say how they did it? 
Most convenient approach is to buy an external USB 3.0 drive, which you'll eventually use as a backup medium.  But for the current objective of transferring your pre-installed Lenovo Win7 system from the delivered hard drive spinner to your new 1TB SSD drive, it can be used as the intermediate copy for a "system image" out-and-back approach.
You don't need a recovery partition, because that will only get you back to "factory" if/when you should ever use it.  You don't want that anyway really, because if disaster strikes a year from now you want an image of your then-current installed and customized system to recover from, not today's Lenovo factory delivered version.  Another reason to want that external USB 3.0 drive... to run regular scheduled periodic backups ("system image" and "data", in a well-defined recipe to provide the type of potential disaster recovery you require with minimal inconvenience and waste of time).
What you call the "hibernate partition" is actually the Boot Manager partition, marked as "active" and thus where the BIOS goes to start the boot process.  The second larger partition is where Win7 itself lives, and where the Boot Manager will launch.  If you had multiple bootable OS's, each would have its own system partition, and you'd have a Boot Manager menu to select your booted OS from.
So when you copy from spinner to SSD, in my opinion you want to end up with just those two partitions, dropping the recovery partition.
Use "free" Macrium Reflect to do the "system image" copy from spinner (just the two partitions) out to external USB 3.0.  Create a standalone bootable CD for Macrium Reflect (using the program's wizard).  Swap the spinner for the SSD.  Boot from the standalone bootable Macrium Reflect CD you created, and restore the just taken "system image" to the SSD.  You should now be able to boot from the SSD, and it should look just like it did on the spinner... which means NOT YET OPTIMIZED FOR SSD.
You'll also have some extra space on the SSD (which I assume is larger than the probably 500GB spinner that came with your W530).  You can use "free" Partition Wizard to partition your new 1TB SSD any way you want.  Depending on how you organize things, a Win7 system partition would normally not need more than 80-100GB tops.  You can create an additional one or more "data" partition(s) in the additional unused space on the SSD.
I know nothing about an M550 SSD, but my Samsung 840 Pro came with Samsung Magician software which gets installed and which then "makes changes to Win7 for optimizing SSD performance".  It also makes use of "over provisioning" on the SSD, which depends on about 10% of the drive being NOT ALLOCATED TO PARTITONS, but which remains unallocated and gets used by the Samsung software for performance optimization.  Samsung Magician also provides what it calls "rapid mode" if you have sufficient RAM in the machine (e.g. 8GB or more), which makes use of RAM for additional SSD performance optimization.
Also, the Win7 "defrag service" should be disabled and if there's a scheduled weekly defrag it should be deleted, to guarantee that it never runs once you have an SSD.
This "system image:" out-and-back method essentially gets you to an SSD version of Lenovo's pre-installed Win7.  You can then uninstall whatever bloatware you want to uninstall, complete Windows Updates, perform Lenovo System Updates for newer drivers, etc., but at least you don't have reinstall Win7 from scratch which is a time saver.