Norton Ghost, SSD and Windows 7 HOW TO

Archive
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This is a post to help those who may have had issues imaging systems with SSD drives and Windows 7. Also some information about alignment settings with SSD. There are several ways to do things, this is just one recommend way.

 

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Boot from Windows 7 disc and at the first setup screen (Language, Keyboard, etc.) press SHIFT + F10. At the new cmd prompt type "C:\" then press Enter.

 

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Next we will repartition the first SSD and alignment it correctly. This will also keep Windows 7 from making a 100mb partition. THIS WILL DELETE ALL DATA ON SDD. Enter the following commands:

diskpart

list disk

select disk 0

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

 

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Now continue with the install of Windows 7. Note that turning off page file, and hibernation makes the Windows foot print only 8GB.

 

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When ready, image your system using any version of Ghost. I tested with Ghost 8.0 32bit version, but really it should not matter. Make sure you do a "Partition to image"

 

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To properly restore an image to an SSD using ghost, make sure the SSD has previously had diskpart correctly performed on it as written above.

 

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Restore the ghost image using your favorite version of ghost. Make sure you do a "Image to Partition" restore. Reboot when ready.

 

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If Windows will not boot (mine did not the first time because the MBR is not yet set), then run the command bootrec /RebuildBcd, then choose the windows installation. There should only be one. Reboot. Enjoy.

 

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pcunite wrote:

If Windows will not boot (mine did not the first time because the MBR is not yet set), then run the command bootrec /RebuildBcd, then choose the windows installation. There should only be one. Reboot. Enjoy.

 

 

pcunite,

 

Thanks for that. Can you recall the error when Win7 didn't boot?

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Brian_K wrote:

Thanks for that. Can you recall the error when Win7 didn't boot?

 

Ahh sorry, I did not think to write it down. It was something like 0X000000, inaccessible boot device. I am new to the forums but was having trouble online with how to go about this. The purpose of this post is to show that, using Ghost you need to save and restore Ghost partitions so that you don't change SSD alignment. This will allow you to use almost any version of Ghost that can write to NTFS. The SSD disc partition needs to be prepared first and manually for new drives. Since we are only using Ghost partitions, skipping the 100mb SRP partition makes it all simpler to manage.

 

I guess if I had a request to make of newer versions of Ghost (I have not tried them yet), I would ask to have them capable of doing a disc or partition save of an SSD. Then when doing a restore, it would prompt or at least honor the sector alignment and recreate the proper MBR needed for Windows 7.