Okay, I'm extremely frustrated and it's 3:30am and I'm giving up.

I purchased an SSD to replace the system drive in my desktop. I cheaped out and picked up a drive that was smaller than my existing system drive. Not much smaller, as my main drive was a 300GB WD Raptor, and the SSD is 240GB.

So first I shrank the main partition of my system drive. I now have a ~175GB partition and whatever that tiny 100MB partition that Windows 7 creates when it installs.

I've tried a couple methods now to no avail. First, I tried using Clonezilla, but I just couldn't get the SSD to boot properly. The furthest I got was to see the Windows 7 boot animation, but then it would say something about Autochk failing because it couldn't be found and I couldn't get any further. No amount of startup repair, bootrec commands, etc could get it to go fully into Windows.

Then I tried the basic buit-in Windows Backup and Recovery method. I created a system image onto a secondary drive, and booted to a recovery disc. But now every time I try to restore the image, I get an error that the restore failed because the "volume shadow copy service component encountered an unexpected error." It doesn't really say anything at all.

So how do I go about doing this? I'd really rather not start from scratch, even though I know it would be a better experience. It just have so freaking much set up in this OS...

Have you tried the dedicated utility that which ever brand the SSD is from provide ?

I did this sort of thing just yesterday for a pal. Very simple:

Boot from a Linux Live stick/cd, use gparted (GUI) to resize the Windows NTFS partition small enough to fit on the SSD, and then just do something akin to this:

sudo cat /dev/sda > /dev/sdb ## sda is old drive, sdb is SSD
sync

Done.

I don't see such a tool, and nothing was on the drive.


Thanks Mark. I did do the partitioning with GParted, and I can try the sudo command you mention. The #'s comment out that last part, right? Sorry, I'm not familiar with Linux shell commands.


I'm also planning on trying something else before I attempt another cloning. I want to move the boot information from the separate partition that Windows creates on install to the C: drive. I can't find any info online about why there's even a second partition for this in the first place. All I can tell is that it makes a multi-boot computer easier to set up, but I don't care about that.

Yes, the # symbol denotes a comment from that point to the end of line. I use a pair of them just for better visual separation.

Assuming the "boot information" is in the first partition of the old drive, the above method will clone that to the SSD as well as the main partition. No extra steps required.

Just be sure and get the drive names correct, and the right way around. gparted shows the names ("sda", "sdb", ..), as does the (often missing) lsscsi command. sudo (aka. SuperUser DO) is merely a "prefix" that says to run a command (after the "sudo" part) as the superuser, with full "admin" privileges for direct hardware (disk) access.

The actual command ("cat") will eventually "fail" with a message of some kind about running out of space, but that can be ignored for this specific usage. Do, however, add a "sync" command afterward. I left that out originally.

Cheers

Oh, I misread what you said about the "boot information" partition. You'd ideally like it to be combined with the main paritition, totally understandable.

Dunno what it's there for though, so I cannot help with that.

Cheers

Okay, I finally figured everything out. I spent a lot of time in the command prompt failing before I finally succeeded.

The primary problem is that "system partition" (as Microsoft calls it). That's where MS decided it should put all the boot information for Windows 7. Most cloning tools I've seen don't clone over two partitions at once, so unless you can do the whole disc (which I couldn't since the SSD was smaller), you have to figure out a way to clone Windows over to the new disc without that boot partition.

The answer is to basically wing it I cloned the partition that contained all the actual files for the OS. Then I used bootrec and diskpart to recreate the MBR data. I also had to run startup repair at least three times until it wouldn't work anymore. I think I'm also forgetting another command or two, like bootsect. I pretty much ran everything.

But that still left me with this autochk error message that prevented Windows from booting. Everything looked good, but the OS still wouldn't boot! Grr.

The solution, as elaborated by the second answer here, was to load the registry hive from the drive (instead of from the recover console), and change the signature for the system drive in the disk's registry to the signature for the system drive in the recovery console. Once I did that, unloaded the hive, and rebooted BAM! I was up and running in Windows! Woohoo!

It was a serious PITA, but even though I've only been using this SSD for a few minutes I'm already blown away. I timed my startup from before the upgrade, and I've gone from a total of SIX minutes (including POST), to somewhere around 90 seconds. Most of that time is spent at POST and also, for some reason, in finding my keyboard and mouse at the Windows login. I have to wait for at least 20 seconds for the peripherals to get recognized before I can enter my password. That means that the whole operating system is loading in around 30 seconds, including at least 20 system tray icons-worth of background programs.

SSDs are wonderful. And slow BIOSs are a real drag.

Our primary MythTV box here, used to run on a mobo that took 45 seconds to POST before running the Linux bootloader, and then another half minute or so to boot from there. Some of the latter delay due to the older Linux distro it was built from.

The new mobo (from a few months back) POSTs within a couple of seconds, and boots very quickly from the SSD. A modern LinuxMint distro under the hood completes the package.

Boot time from pressing the Power button to having MythFrontend ready for playback: 20 seconds.

The Samsung "TV" monitor for the system takes almost that long to boot up from pressing its Power button. Mind you, it is based on an older Linux distro too.

I don't think I've read the brand of SSD disk, I believe. I can only say that most manufacturers ship or offer disk cloning software with their disk, like eg. Samsung, Intel, Plextor, Sandisk, OCZ, or Crucial does. Of course, there are others. There's also Paragon's disk cloning software, but that costs about $20.

Thanks for the links, but I purchased a Crucial drive, and if you take a second look at their page you'll see they only ship a copy of Acronis with their "Desktop Install Kit." It doesn't come with the drive...

You are correct, but as said, I had no idea what type of SSD you bought. I'm pretty sure Crucial will follow soon with free disk cloning software though, since they seems to have become a minority under the SSD brands for not including it. That doesn't help you now of course, so I'm happy to hear you've already fixed your problem.

Yeah, sorry, I meant to say which brand I'd purchased. I thought you were listing the brands that offered free tools with their drives, and Crucial doesn't.

I fixed the issue, but it certainly wasn't a pleasant process! That much work shouldn't be necessary. I can honestly say that this is one area where OSX has Windows beat hands-down. With Tom's help, a while back I was able to clone my old Macbook onto a new SSD, and the process was painless. I'd even call it simple! Windows backup, on the other hand, just didn't work here, and I'm not sure why.

It's certainly an odd thing that Microsoft decided to make a separate boot partition as the standard for Windows 7 installations, at least the ones done from scratch. That's what made this whole process so difficult. Otherwise it would have been pretty easy too.

The free version of Macrium Reflect works well. Its functionality is similar to Acronis True Image. It probably would have worked for your needs. Sorry I'm late.

Okay, I've been getting Samsung SSDs for the PCs I'm building, and they come with a great cloning program. It only works with their drives, but it does a great job.

I'm having a weird issue with my own system after switching to an SSD. I don't really know if it's because of the SSD. It's probably just something I didn't notice before because the rest of my boot process was really slow and masked this.

When my system boots, everything is fast. Everything, that is, except for when I get to the login screen. When I get there, the cursor just sits blinking in the box for a long time and I'm not able to type or move the mouse cursor. Any idea what might delay the keyboard/mouse initialization so much? I'm using Logitech peripherals with a unifying receiver.

Does the login behave if you use a hard wired keyboard?

I'll check that out, but I don't think it does. I think I tried that early on and it behaved the same way.