Replacing the hard drive in a Lenovo Y50

professormoobsicle

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Aug 16, 2012
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I'm considering purchasing this laptop and I want to replace the hybrid HDD with an SSD/standard 7200 rpm HDD. I don't think the laptop comes with a Windows CD, so how would I get around transferring Windows from the HDD to the new HDD? Would I have to create a system image on an external and transfer it?
 
Solution
You can clone your drive using third party software, all you need is a USB enclosure for the new drive and (sometimes) a CD/USB for the cloning software. Some manufacturers offer disk cloning software with their drives, but not all of them. I personally use Clonezilla whenever I need to clone a drive, but there are other free solutions like Macrium that you can try as well. Just make sure the software you choose has a sector by sector cloning option, which will copy the disk exactly, leaving you with the same OS installation as the old drive. As a bonus, the USB enclosure you buy can then keep your old hard drive in there for data storage if you wish.

Your OS is tied to your computer, so change the drive and reinstall it.
 

..how? There is no OS media included. Reinstall it using what? The recovery OS image is on the drive you are replacing.

I guess OP can either contact Lenovo support or try copying the D partition (where recovery exists) to the new SSD and go on from there. I have no confidence on the latter, even I'm researching methods as I too will probably buy this laptop soon and replace with SSD. I have been looking for answers for the past hour.
 
You can clone your drive using third party software, all you need is a USB enclosure for the new drive and (sometimes) a CD/USB for the cloning software. Some manufacturers offer disk cloning software with their drives, but not all of them. I personally use Clonezilla whenever I need to clone a drive, but there are other free solutions like Macrium that you can try as well. Just make sure the software you choose has a sector by sector cloning option, which will copy the disk exactly, leaving you with the same OS installation as the old drive. As a bonus, the USB enclosure you buy can then keep your old hard drive in there for data storage if you wish.
 
Solution