Windows Home Server Magic

The SSD I got simply wasn’t cutting the mustard on my desktop so I decided to move the drive to my laptop.  I thought I was going to have do some hardware-fu but was relieved when I found that my laptop had an empty hard drive bay in it, the laptop’s that big.  My attempt at a straight move didn’t quite work out as every f#ing piece of partition management software on the face of the planet won’t allow you to migrate to smaller disk.  So what did I do?

1) Create new partition of the same size as OS partition (which in my case was done using the SATA cables to connect to a disk 3 feet away that was a 3.5″ drive).
2) Migrate to new partition
3) Defrag new partition
4) Shrink partition
5)Backup partition
6)Track down 32-bit network drivers for everything
7)Restore to original target partition

Just as easy as it says on the Windows Home Server box.  On the plus side, the Microsoft Community moderator gave my solution a gold star!  24 more and I get the “Expert” tag and a green border on the MS forums.