I was going to suggest Affinity but Spock mentioned he dabbles in the other parts of the suite sometimes. Premiere has modern, better competition (some of it free) nowadays but there hasn’t really been a good Acrobat competitor. My choice, Nitro PDF, has gone subscription in the last few years as well. They do have an Illustrator competitor though.
The thing is, recommending software updates may be good but no telling how old his system running all of that is.
Thanks for the further suggestions, @draxen and @rei. Affinity Photo does sound promising. Photoshop needs more competition! If I can’t do this upgrade thing, I’ll figure something out – something like Affinity, or GIMP, or just suck it up and pay the Photoshop subscription.
@mono Disabling my internet connection did get me past “checking for updates,” so that’s good. But then I got to the crux of the matter: " We couldn’t update system reserved partition." According to Microsoft’s site, this means “The System Reserved Partition (SRP) may be full. The System Reserve Partition (SRP) is a small partition on your hard drive that stores boot information for Windows. Some third-party anti-virus and security apps write to the SRP, and can fill it up…”
So this may mean you’re right – best for me to try again once I’ve cloned the drive onto a larger one. But cloning will obviously reproduce my apparently tiny SRP. After googling, I determined that my SRP is MRB style. There are some command-line options for freeing up some SRP space, but they sound a little risky. An alternative might be something like Partition Magic?
This is why I advised to not clone and setup on a clean drive or delete all the partitions as I mentioned.
Yeah, I’m re-reading your posts now. To answer your earlier question, my SSD contains only one partition, the C: drive. Well, I guess it has this secret second system partition that I can’t see. It’s a 125GB SSD, with about 35GB free. Much of the occupied space is junk from AppData that I’ve been gradually deleting.
But your approach means a clean install of Windows, which means the system won’t know about CS3 (or any of my other applications), right? It will wipe registry entries etc? So then I’d have to hope I could reinstall and reactivate CS3, and I’m not optimistic on that score.
If the post-clone upgrade doesn’t work, you’ll have to do a clean install anyway.
The Samsung cloning utility often moves partitions based on their relative percentage on the disk. So your SRP may be bigger post-clone. If not, and you can’t upgrade, it’s time to nuke the new drive and install clean. That’s of course always the best way to go, but in some cases, including yours, if you can get the upgrade complete on the new drive, you should be able to operate business as usual.
Give Paint .net a try as well, if you’re considering GIMP.
Thanks for the suggestion, @barstein. I’ll check it out.
I may have to hope for that. I managed to free up 14.5MB in my System Reserve Partition – but alas, I need 15 MB free. (I followed the instructions at “We couldn’t update system reserved partition” error installing Windows 10 - Microsoft Support )
Some third-party partition managers claim they can enlarge the SRP, but I don’t know anything about them. Thinking on it. I suppose the wise thing to do is to try the clone first.
Laughs in Quicken 99.
“Why, yes, it’s Y2K compliant!"
Oh man! laughs
Making and using PDFs from 2007 make some exploitable PDFs.
OK, I’ve installed a new Samsung 1TB SSD, and it’s running fine, but I can’t get the Samsung clone utility to install. It just hangs with almost no green progress on the progress bar. Running it as Administrator didn’t help. (Sigh.) As an alternative, I tried downloading Clonezilla but I don’t understand how it works. I’m ready to give up and just install Windows 10 on this new SSD.
Can I install Windows 10 on the new drive and leave Windows 7 on the old drive, then use something like EasyBCD to dual-boot? If so, I just boot from my USB Win 10 media stick, and I gather I can then choose to install Win 10 to that drive instead of my existing drive? Do I need to assign the new SSD a drive letter first?
I don’t know if this approach will create an activation/licensing issue, but at this point, I’ll pay it if need be.
Upgrading your Win 7 PC seems well & truly cursed.
Do the obvious stuff. Run disk cleanup to clear out any temp files. Reboot, etc, try the install again. Maybe create a new admin user and try to install from that account.
You can try the free Aomei backup standard as an alternative if you can get it to install: https://www.ubackup.com/free-backup-software.html
It clones disks. More fiddly than the Samsung migration software but pretty straightforward.
If you can’t get any cloning software to install, I’d bite the bullet and clean install Win 10 on the new drive. You can pick your default boot drive in BIOS/UEFI. Usually there’s a function key that would allow you to choose a different drive to dual boot, but EasyBCD should work. Honestly, I wouldn’t entangle your new Windows install with your old Win 7. Unplug the old SSD when you install to make certain there’s no confusion, and just pick your boot disk from BIOS if you reconnect it after the new install is up and running.
Thanks. The Aomei app did install right away. It has an option to “clone disk” and one to “clone system,” but the latter supposedly requires the paid version of the program. Will “clone disk” suffice?
If the clone works, but doesn’t expand the System Reserve Partition on the new SSD, presumably I could still install Windows 10 to the new SSD?
Clone disk is what you want.
If it works, and you can boot off the new disk, give the Win 10 upgrade a shot.
If you can’t clone, or Win 7 on the clone still won’t upgrade, nuke the new drive and perform the clean install.
I assume you tried installing on the win7 system. You could try installing it on a (maybe temporary) win10 system running on the new drive? Or on something else like a flash drive?
Well, he’d have trouble cloning the old drive to the new drive from a temp OS on the new drive. :)
AOMEI has a built in utility to let you create a bootable USB.
However since @Spock was able to install the full program on Win 7, he shouldn’t need to create a bootable USB.
Thanks for your replies. Thanks to all of you for all your help with this.
@mono I let the Aomei cloning program do its thing while I did other stuff this evening. I just checked, and alas, the Aomei cloning program is stuck at 98%. The program provides a link that says “update system information,” and when I click on it, sure enough, it says it’s updating system information. I wonder if it’s that pesky System Reserve Partition, heh.
I suppose I might as well let it run overnight, as I’m about to go to bed, but I’m not optimistic. It’s not the end of the world. I’m sort of liking the idea of simply dual-booting. I just want to be sure I install Win 10 on the new SSD, not the old one!
I can’t do anything right, it seems – even though I’ve built my own systems in the past. I gave up on the cloning program, which never finished. I reformatted the drive and decided just to try to put a clean install of Windows 10 on it.
I used the USB stick, it installed Windows 10 on the new SSD, and then said it would reboot. But at this point I forgot to remove the USB stick, and the system rebooted to the USB stick, asking to install again. I re-rebooted, this time removing the USB stick, but the system would not boot to the new SSD. At first I got an error message telling me to insert boot media. After googling, I read that maybe this meant I needed to make that drive ‘active’, so i tried doing that, using Windows 7. But now when I try to boot to the new HD, the system tells me ‘no OS found on target disk’ or some such.
I guess the next step is to start over – reinstall Windows 10 on the target disk again, and this time remember to remove the USB stick when Windows wants to reboot. I have to run out right now, but I’ll try tonight I guess.
The new drive seems to work fine. I can peruse it in Windows 7 (after making it ‘active’ – was that a mistake?) I see it in the BIOS. I hope my mistake was just forgetting to remove the USB stick after being told to reboot. (The Windows installer doesn’t mention doing this.)
Anyway, I’ll try again tonight, but if anyone has further advice, I’m all ears.
No, keeping the USB in does not fuck up the drive after it’s installed. Install the clean Win 10 on the new SSD (While the win7 drive and any other is not plugged in). Make sure to set the correct boot order in the BIOS.
If that doesn’t work, might be a BIOS vs. UEFI issue (unlikely for an older system). But first do the clean install on the single connected drive.
In BIOS was your new hard drive set to be the first bootable hard drive in the drive list?
I would check that first.
