I'm trying to copy to and boot from my new SSD with my current version of Win 7 now located on my hard drive. The hard drive is configured with three partitions, as shown on Win 7's Disk management utility:
partition 1: 100 MB boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition
partition 2: C: 117.09 GB 53.9 GB used, 63.1 free
partition 3: D: 814.32 GB
The SSD is 112 GB
Using Ghost 15, I copied the first partition of the hard drive to the SSD with no problems, using the options specified in other posts. When I attempted to copy the second partition (drive C:) with the options specified for it, Ghost almost completed, then gave an error message and the copy aborted with nothing copied. I realized that the target was smaller, by about 6 GB, than the source and figure that is the reason it won't copy. As noted above, only 53.9 GB is actually used, but I suppose that Ghost is doing a mirror image copy.
Then, I tried restoring drive C: from a Ghost backup (the v2i files, about 34 GB total). This caused an even worse problem: I can't see the disk in the Disk Management console because i see the following next to it: 'the disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online.'
Questions So far I haven't found a diskpart command (command line program in Win 7 and earlier) that will remove the signature from the SSD so that I can continue to work with it. The 'clean' command does not work. Is there a Ghost utility (either run from Win 7 or the System recovery disk) to allow me to wipe the disk and start over?
If I remove the partition and signature, I can repeat the partition 1 (the boot partition) copy as I did before. For the drive C: copy, can I simply perform a file copy (instead of a disk copy) from partition 2 to the remaining area of the SSD after partitioning and formatting it, or will that not work? If so, should I use Ghost to do the file copy, or use a command-line tree copy?
The other option is to reduce the size of the C: partition on the hard disk to below that of the SSD and then copy it using Ghost and the options given. But I have not been able to do that either, possibly because there are unmovable files near the end of the disk. a. For instance, in Disk management, I can right-click on the C: partition and select Shrink volume. The result of doing this returns a window that says the volume can be shrunk by only 0.5 GB (when I need to reduce it by 6 GB)! This is the case even after I use the freeware program MyDefrag and select Consolidate free space to move files and directories to the beginning of the disk. It shows pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys (labeled as nonmoveable system files) near the end of the partition.
I haven't trid it yet, but Win 7 allows me to (I believe) remove pagefile.sys by setting virtual memory size to zero in an advanced dialog. But it doesn't mention (in that dialog) how to remove hiberfil.sys. I could remove temporarily remove pagefile.sys, resize the drive, then set virtual memory size back to the original. Would this work?
