Cloning SSD on Dell Latitude E6420 with Ghost 15

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1

From reading other posts on this forum, I gather that there is a particular order of steps to take in order to properly clone a boot drive with Ghost 15.  Having tried it before reading this forum and having failed in booting the cloned machine, I'm now looking for what the order of operations is to do this succesfully

 

Here is the picture of Disk Management on the existing drive.

 

Disk Management.png

 

The machine that will be the clone will obviously have a similar partition structure.

 

My order of operations would be to save the copy to an external USB drive which is larger than the source drive, then perform the restore to the target machine booting from the Ghost CD with the external USB drive as the source.

 

Any guidance you can offer is greatly appreciated.

2

ShallowHal,

 

So you plan to upgrade to a larger HD in your laptop.

 

These are the options....

 

http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Cloning-HDD-to-SSD-Dell-XPS-8300/m-p/836428#M51677

 

Your Dell partitions are the "same". Any questions.

 

Edit... Have I misunderstood? You are referring to using only one laptop?

3
Brian_K wrote:

Have I misunderstood? You are referring to using only one laptop?

Yes.  There are two laptops - identical models with identical hardware.  The external hard drive would be the intermediary where the image(s)/restore points would be stored and then restored from.  Don't know if that affects whether I use One Time Backup or Copy Drive.

 

From my exploration of the One Time Backup Feature, it looks as though you have to create a partition and assign a drive letter in order to use that feature.  I have no issue with doing that - I just wasn't sure whether it was better to go that route or to try to use the Copy Drive feature in unallocated unpartitioned space.  I tried doing a Copy Drive with the Recovery partition today, but it finished with errors so I didn't attempt anything else.

4

I'd use image/restore. Your main problem will be Windows Activation on the new computer as it will need a new license.

5

Windows Activation should be OK as each laptop comes with its own license key for Windows 7 activation.

 

Do you recommend clearing the partitions off of the target drive and then restoring each image in order as it was on the source drive?

6

That's correct. The target drive is blank. Use the options I suggested in the other thread.

 

Do the laptops have SSDs or HDs?

 

 

7

The laptops have SSD's.  The USB external drive also is an SSD.

8

Once you have images you really don't need the Recovery partition. It is using 10% of your SSD space. But to remove it isn't easy. Let us know if you ever want to do this as it involves...

 

Copying the booting files from Recovery partition to Win7 partition

Setting Win7 partition Active

Deleting Recovery partition

Sliding Win7 partition up to the OEM partition

Resizing Win7 partition

Done

 

9

Ran the restore as indicated.  I did get into an infinite reboot loop after my first shutdown and restart of the system after I completed the clone, but it turned out to be a weird driver issue with the video driver that was causing it.  There was no video issue on the source machine, but for some reason the target machine wasn't happy..  Was able to boot into Safe Mode, uninstall the driver, and then reinstall the driver and it's rebooted happily several times since

 

Thanks for all the help and detailed suggetsions Brian.

 

10

Excellent news.