Not booting after cloning HD a SSD drive, Recovery CD not working...

Layback Bear · 09 Jun 2016

I seriously doubt that both computer are exactly the same.
They would have to have the same motherboard signature and bios.
They would have to have the same COA key for Windows 7; which they shouldn't.

Because you don't seem to have backups or clones of your original system before your drive died, the best option would be a Clean Install of Windows 7 on a new drive using the COA key on the Microsoft Sticker located somewhere on your laptop. All you special settings and programs would have to be done anew again.

You could just save your damaged drive and try to recover your data from it once your system is up and running properly.

Edit:
If you did get to use your recovery partition on the damaged drive all it would do is put your compute back to the way it was when it was made, therefore you would of lost all your special setting and programs.

sights · 09 Jun 2016

Layback Bear said:

I seriously doubt that both computer are exactly the same.
They would have to have the same motherboard signature and bios.
They would have to have the same COA key for Windows 7; which they shouldn't.

***Exactly what problem are you trying to solve?

Yeah, you might be right. I am certainly no PC-wizard :).

My HDD crashed, taking with it the recovery partition used to restore the computer to its factory state.
The computer is a custom built music computer with optimizations made to the OS.

If I just reinstall Windows (which was also stored on the recovery partition) I will loose all those optimizations.

So my idea was to clone my friends HDD, to access the recovery partition of of that one and do a factory reset, so the drive will be clean, and windows reinstalled with all the optimizations that came from the manufacturer, as well as all the drivers.

Layback Bear · 09 Jun 2016

Please read my post #11 again, I have updated it.
We are posting over the top of each other.

Please complete your system specs using this tutorial by Brink.

System Info - See Your System Specs

sights · 09 Jun 2016

Haha, yes it seems like we are posting past eachother :).

All the optimizations will be there when doing the factory reset. The recovery partition contains the "fresh" whole system as it was the first time you turn the computer on. So all drivers, optimizations and windows 7.

I don´t know I might be completely wrong, but this seems like the only way to be able to reset the computer to it´s factory state.

sights · 09 Jun 2016

I noticed that the SSD I cloned to was formatted as GPT.
Could that explain the boot problems?
Using partition wizard to remove the partitions and will try to clone again.

I think I might have accidentally set the SSD disk as GPT when initializing it before cloning.