Using Ghost to upgrade Windows 7 to an SSD drive

For all those struggling to make this work and having spent two evenings reading through a lot of the idea's talked and suggested on line about this subject, I thought I would post the ACTUAL way I managed to do this!  I have now repeated this 4 times on two different systems with complete success each time.

 

First, add the SSD drive as an external using a USB enclosure, open Disk Management, set the disk type to basic and make sure there are NO PARTITIONS of any kind on  the disk. Right click any partitions that are there and remove them.

 

Next set the Folder Options to VIEW HIDDEN FILES and remove the check box from HIDE SYSTEM FILES - not sure if this actually has an effect but i did it as a step so I'm telling you exactly what I did.

 

REBOOT

 

Now right click on the hidden BDE partition and allocate a drive number - this makes it visible to Ghost.

 

Open Ghost 15 and select Disk Copy.  First copy the BDE partition to the *.* unallocated drive that matches the size of the volume of your SSD drive - its probably the only unconfigured drive listed.  Use the following options....

 

set drive active

disable smart sector copy (if this is not greyed out)

ignore bad sectors

copy MBR

 

this will run and take seconds

 

Then go back to disk manager and remove the drive letter allocation to both the BDR partition on the source disk and the BDE partition on the destination disk.

 

Next for the active Windows partition itself....

 

Go back to Ghost and select Copy Drive.  Select the C drive as the source and the remaining unpartitioned space on the SSD drive as the target .

 

Select the following options

 

resize drive to fill unallocated space

Set Drive Active

Disable Smart Sector Copy

Ignore Bad Sectors

Copy MBR

 

This will take upwards of an hour to complete the copy.

 

If this errors saying it cant write to destination, my guess is that you haven't cleared the partition and are trying to write to formatted space - that wont work if you have Copy MBR set and if you uncheck this the resulting image will be corrupt - so go back and make sure the disk is properly preped

 

Once the copy is complete you should have two icons in My Computer - they should be named the same and have the same files on them.

 

SHUTDOWN

 

remove the old drive, fit the new one.

 

Insert the Windows 7 CD and boot from this.  Select English and your locale then hit SHIFT - F10

 

At the prompt type bootrec /RebuildBcd  then exit. 

 

Now continue with the CD install process to main page where you can select REPAIR.  

 

The system will then make one fix to the disk and reboot you.  Eject the CD at this point.

 

The system will come up cleanly and let you enter your username and password, then it will say it needs to reboot to apply changes.

 

When the system boots this time you will have a working system.

 

THIS ACTUALLY WORKS!!!  unlike almost everything else I tried.  Its an amalgam of many other posts and help I received from Norton support.  Having gone through loads of pain trying to get the right process and run through this about 30 times over the last 72 hours - I thought I would share the process that works!

 

Good luck and make sure you follow the above to the letter - every setting and every step counts.