Using Norton Ghost to clone to an SSD

locust76 · ‎02-09-2012

Hello everyone,

I've already sent a PM to Brian_K asking about cloning tips and I thought I would have more questions until my SSD gets here tomorrow, so I created this thread.

I have successfully removed my System Recovery Partition, so I'm only going to be cloning one active Windows 7 boot partition to the SSD. The partition is 150GB and my SSD will be 256GB, so I won't have any problems there.

What do I need to be mindful of? Brian_K said to make sure the current partition was 2048 aligned, which it is, but seeing how I removed my SRP, it is aligned at offset 105,906,176 bytes. Since I only want the one partition on my SSD, will I have to do anything special, or will Ghost recognize this and align it to 2048 right away?

DaveH · ‎01-06-2010

Your partition is aligned, you can verify that by dividing the offset by 2048 and ending up with a round number.

You removed the SRP but never utilized the space.

Ghost will keep it aligned but be aware that since the partition will be in a different starting point so as not to waste all the free space you'll need to do a startup repair for it to boot the first time.

Dave

Edit- here is how to make a startup repair disk:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5409/create-a-system-repair-disc-in-windows-7/

Brian_K · ‎04-19-2009

DaveH wrote:
since the partition will be in a different starting point so as not to waste all the free space you'll need to do a startup repair for it to boot the first time.

Dave,

That doesn't happen (needing a Repair) on my test computer anymore. It did in the past but it may have been related to pre SP1.

locust76,

How much space do you want the Win7 partition to take up on the SSD? Your choice.

Edit... Just noticed you only want one partition so choose "fill unallocated space".

DaveH · ‎01-06-2010

Thanks Brian, I didn't know that has changed. The only place I have windows 7 installed by it'self in a single partition is in VPC and I'm trying to get it to give me SP1 without having to install everything else first.

Dave

locust76 · ‎02-09-2012

Well, none of that worked at all. I cloned the boot partition to the drive, done in under 10 minutes (SATA 3 SSD over USB3 ;), but Windows didn't like being installed on a RAID and then booted from a single AHCI disk... so I had to do a fresh install. Inconvenient, yes, but it is exactly for this reason that I don't keep my documents on my boot drive/partition.

DaveH · ‎01-06-2010

Of course it didn't work. Nowhere did you say anything about RAID or trying to go from a RAID to a single disk.

You ended up with a blue screen 7b error because it takes a different driver for AHCI.

Dave

locust76 · ‎02-09-2012

I mentioned it to Brian in a PM and he expressed his doubts that it would work.

Anyways, it doesn't really matter. It's better this way because I get a fresh install, plus all my data is still intact because I back my system up every day... I suppose Ghost actually worked perfectly, It's just Windows being stupid :P

Thanks for all your help! At least now I know the basics of cloning to an SSD. Maybe one day I can convince my wife to let me upgrade her laptop with an SSD :P No RAID there, thankfully!

Brian_K · ‎04-19-2009

locust76 wrote:
I mentioned it to Brian in a PM and he expressed his doubts that it would work.

Not really. I said I don't use RAID. Others have cloned with RAID setups.

DaveH · ‎01-06-2010

Ghost worked fine, it was just a driver issue.

Your RAID was using RAID drivers and it takes a different driver to boot AHCI.

Most systems, depending on the BIOS will let you boot as RAID even without an array.

If your BIOS allowed that setting you could have booted the single drive using the RAID driver. Then in windows install the AHCI driver, reboot into the BIOS and change the setting to AHCI.

On systems that don't let you boot as RAID, the easiest way is to first install the AHCI driver before you image the system.

There are a couple different ways to do that, an easy way is to temporarily setup the single drive as a slave using AHCI.

Third way would be to use an image program that lets you restore to different hardware or use a tool to inject the correct driver into the restored image.

Dave

locust76 · ‎02-09-2012

Thanks for the tip, Dave! It never even occurred to me to leave the controller in RAID mode. I used Ghost to back up my current partition and I'm now restoring my windows home server backup from the 9th. I will try leaving the controller in RAID mode and see if it boots from the disk with the controller in JBOD mode. Probably will... I'll report back here if it works! If not, I can just use Ghost to restore the backed up partition and call it a day :)