Will True Image Work for Me?

Those recovery disks should let you do a factory recovery to any other drive. Before you attempted the install on the SSD, did you remove the 500Gb and put the SSD in its place?

While True Image should let you clone the 500 to the 80 SSD (as long as the used space on the 500 is less than 80Gb) there have been so many complaints by users in the forum here about the latest builds (6029 and 6053) of ver. 2010 that you will not know it will work for you until you try.

But Acronis does let you download a Trial version, good for 15 days I think, so you can try it. If you decide to go ahead with this, instead of using the Clone feature, make a Backup (also called Image) instead. It is the safer way - some users have reported that, after using the Clone feature, the original drive ended up wiped. Quite likely this may be "pilot error" but better to be safe than sorry.

If you go the Backup route you will have to have a third drive to hold the Image OR you can do a double swap. First use the SSD as the destination for the Backup Image. Then transfer the Image over to the 500Gb. Now interchange the drives - unless the HP can boot from either location.

You will need the True Image bootable Rescue CD to effect the restore to the SSD so after you instal the Trial on the 500Gb, make this CD.

Yes, the SSD was installed in the computer and I attempted the HP recovery, to no avail.

I guess I'll have to do some reading on the difference between clone and backup. It's two different softwares, right, so I'd have to decide before purchasing? Does the trial version have limitations? I didn't want to go down that testing route and find I made a bigger mess of things.

Could I simply copy the entire contents of my 500GB drive to my 80GB SSD then swap them and have it boot from the SSD? The used space isn't an issue. This is a brand new computer with Win 7 Pro that I haven't loaded anything on (other than Firefox) because I knew I wanted to switch to an SSD system drive, so I didn't want to waste time configuring it prior to making the swap. The laptop does hold two drives, but I believe only the primary drive slot is bootable.

How would the backup method work exactly? I would backup to the SSD and then if I put the SSD in as the boot drive it would be able to boot to it? How is this different from copying the drive?

Thanks for any further suggestions!

Clone and Backup (also called Image) ....
When you clone a drive you can swap out source and destination and the destination drive will be bootable (if all went right) just like the source.

When you make a Backup, you create a compressed Image of the source. This Image has to go through the Recovery process (to the destination drive) before it becomes bootable like the original source drive. The Image file is much like a Zip file except the extension is TIB.

So with Backup you need a place to store the Image temporarily. In your case you can put the Image on the SSD temporarily. When the process is done copy the Image back to the source drive. (From what you say it should be small enough to do this).

Next put the SSD drive in the booting location and the 500Gb drive where the SSD was.
Now boot with the Rescue CD, choose Recovery from its menu to restore the Image - that is now on the 500Gb - to the SSD. The process will wipe everything from the SSD before starting the restore process.

The Sticky Topic above by GroverH has a lot of good info for beginners.

Make sure you backup and restore the entire original hard disk. Don't just restore the system partition. Your HP recovery disks are probably an image of your system partition. That won't do if you're migrating to another hard drive in a pre-built like HP. You need to restore all partitions (including that recovery partition you mentioned). Any good disk imaging software (True Image) will do this.
Oh, and a clean install of Windows 7 won't be possible unless you get HP to send you the OEM copy of Windows. Otherwise you're stuck with the HP factory install (basically what's on that recovery partition)

I'm okay with a recovery install if it will actually work. My concern is I don't really understand how imaging software works from a size perspective. Based on my recovery disks, it appears that "image" had some size component that immediately killed the process since my new SSD is only 80GB and the old HDD is 500GB.

I know my 500GB drive does not contain 80GB of data (although I need to check when I get home what the actual amount of data is as well as the default partition sizes HP used), but if the True Image software creates an image from a 500GB drive, can it restore that image to an 80GB drive (given, of course, that the used space is less than 80GB) regardless of the partition sizes that exist on the original drive? That's where I'm concerned...

Yes, only used data on a huge drive will be written to the backup image so you will be able to restore on that 80GB SSD.

Good, that's what I was hoping. I guess the key here is that we are now talking about backup rather than creating an image, right? That makes sense to me.

So, is the software I need Acronis True Image Home 2010? What about Acronis Easy Migrate 7.0? I know that's different than what we've been discussing above, which would be better?

And how would the backup/recovery process handle existing partitions. Does it scale their size down proportionally relative to the size of the new drive? I believe I have either one or two partitions (again, I'll need to check when I get home): an HP recovery partition, and maybe some sort of Win 7 recovery partition (not sure about that one?). I want to say there's a hidden partition that I only found when looking deeper in the computer settings.

Thanks for your feedback. It's nice to get some input before pulling the trigger and finding out that yet another avenue I spend time/money on to reconfigure my computer won't work.

Look at the very first line in message #3.

Perhaps items 7B & 7D inside my signature index can help.

A disk option backup (all partition included) is an image of your computer. An image is also referenced as an archive. The image (*.tib) can be restored onto a new blank disk and the result will be a 2nd identical(?) disk except for disk size variations. Partitions can be omitted, included, rearranged, or enlarged for the desired size. If properly restored, the second disk will be bootable if the source was bootable.

A disk image is about 60-70% the size of the used space on your disk (free space not involved). Since an image is just a file, you can store many images on the same storage drive.

A clone is a duplication of another disk. One clone consumes all the space (including free space) so there cannot be multiple clones on a disk. if you clone, you have two alike disks--except for differences in capacity between the source and destination.

This interpretation relates to how used within Acronis TrueImage.

Sorry to be dense, which message is #3? I keep getting the the line where I said: "Yes, the SSD was installed in the computer and I attempted the HP recovery, to no avail."

Thanks for the info! I will plan to review your index before doing anything.