I am having some trouble creating a clean clone of Windows 7 64. My intention was to clone a 250g sata hard drive to a 64 gb solid state drive.
I shrunk the partition on the sata drive to be smaller than 64gb, booted off the Ghost CD and did a backup of the sata drive. After the image was complete I swapped in the SSD and tried to do a restore, first of the small 300mb partition(which from my understanding is the actual booting partition), and then the real windows 7 partition.
After both partitions were restored I tried booting the system on the SSD and it failed, at which point I put in a Windows 7 install disk and preformed a repair on the system. Once the repair was done the system booted and all seemed to be functioning normally.
Now for the problem, if the system is restarted everything works fine, but if I turn the system off, let it sit a few sec, and turn it on it shows only a black screen, no windows splash screen and just sits. If I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL at the black screen the system reboots and everything comes up fine.
Sorry for the long winded explanation, but I tried several different ways to clone this hard drive and this is the closest I have gotten with ghost cloning windows 7. I don't know if it is Windows 7 or G15 but it is defiantly not as easy as it used to be to clone a drive.
But you must have made an error if you needed to do a Startup Repair. Was the SATA HD removed from the computer when you first booted the SSD? Do you have the SSD plugged into the same SATA port on the motherboard that the SATA HD was using before you removed the SATA HD?
It is a laptop, so they were using the same sata port.
I tried several different ways to make the clone, and none of them were successful.
At the end I even tried booting into windows and doing the hard drive copy in ghost, but that gave a set of errors where it would sit at preparing desktop. From what I understand it was because the SSD id was in windows as a different drive letter, but I couldn't get regedit to run to make the changes.
And everything is functional about my clone other than, when it boots up from a power off situation you have to reset the machine again. The bios screen flashes and then it goes black. ctrl+alt+del and it resets and boot straight into windows.
I searched quite a bit but didn't find what I would call a definitive guide to cloning a windows 7 hard drive.
Thanks for the response, this short job is turning into too much of a project.
This thread is what ended up working, well what lead me to where I am.
I guess when you tried Copy Drive from Windows you copied to a partition with a drive letter on your SSD. That will give you the "preparing desktop" error. You should copy to unallocated space or to a partition without a drive letter.
You now have a successful clone which won't boot properly. I don't think it has anything to do with Ghost anymore. Check your BIOS settings. It doesn't sound like the SSD is the first boot device.