I just got a new XPS 8700 with Windows 8. I have an SSD drive from the Windows 7 system that it is replacing that I want to use as the boot and C drive of the system. The XPS 8700 is new, so I don't need to preserve any data on it.
I made a set of recovery DVDs. I disconnected the hard disk and installed the SSD. I followed the instructions on the youtube video "." I choose the factory refresh option (only restores system partition) when it appeared. It went through the entire restore process and appeared to work. It took a long time, no errors were reported and it said recovery completed. When I rebooted, the system was running Windows 7 from the old system the SSD came from.
There are only two partitions on the SSD, a 100 MB boot partition and a 80 something GB system partition. If it didn't put Windows 8 on the SSD, what was it doing all the time it said it was "preparing your hard drive", restoring your system" and "finalizing"?
I then booted from a Partition Wizard bootable DVD and deleted all the partitions on the SSD and wiped it (overwrite the disk with 0's). I tried the recovery process and this time it did not give me the choice of factory refresh or factory recovery. It just says "your drive size is not supported for this process. Please use a hard drive of at least 931 GB in size." Why on earth does it need such a large disk size to recover?
How do I get my SSD set up? This has to be a pretty common upgrade.
