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I bought a SSD with a cable and Acronis software, but the software requires you to boot from a DVD; and of course I don't have a DVD. I then tried their trial software, but they disabled the cloning feature.

The only free software I can find just clones, but my 500gb harddrive isn't going to fit on my 60gb ssd.

Is there any free software out there that will work?

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Hi,

As far as I am aware you will need to fresh install the OS on the SSD and then copy your data across. Are you going to use both the SSD and the original drive or just the SSD?

[Troy]

Hi,

As far as I am aware you will need to fresh install the OS on the SSD and then copy your data across. Are you going to use both the SSD and the original drive or just the SSD?

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Just the SSD.
I didn't get a Windows "disk", so how can I do a fresh install?

[Kemasa]

It might be possible to reduce the size of the system partition on the 500Gb drive (first reduce the data used, then you use qtparted from a Linux LiveCD to reduce the size of the partition). Once the partition is small enough, then you can copy the data over using the "dd" command fron a Linux LiveCD (dd bs=32M if=SOURCE_DISK of=DEST_DISK where SOURCE_DISK and DEST_DISK is the device name, such as /dev/sd1).

I am not sure if it would work as far as booting the system, but I don't think that there is any drive specific information on it.

There are other ways of copying the partition, but you also have to copy the boot information as well.

It might also be possible to take the DVD and copy it to a USB device to boot from that. Another option is to buy a USB DVD drive.