Windows 7: What software to use with SSD clone and for backup too? Many Choices!!

You can use Paragon Migrate OS to SSD 3.0 but I don't know how that works.
You have to do #129 step 1 to 5 anyway. Post diskmanagement screenshot afterwards

You can delete SSD by right clicking the partition in disk management and select "delete volume". you don't have to "clean" the disk. But to be able to do it, you have to boot from old C. Otherwise SSD is in use and you can't delete the volume.

Image is a partition backup. It's 1 large file with all parition stuff in it (label, type [primary/logical], file system type, size and so on). For example you make on image of C and put the result on G and keep 3 versions. In case your harddisk dies you can restore it by booting from macrium rescue cd in case windows is dead.

You also use image to backup to external disk, and later swap faulty disk. after that restore the image.

A clone is just a partition copy. It's actually the same as making an image and restoring it.

So use clone in your case

It went great until I hit number 5.

It boots to SSD with that boot order that you have. When I make the hard drive active, it boots to hard drive.

1 - I moved the few items saved to the hard drive.
2 - I marked the HD as active.
3 - It booted successfully.
4 - System Reserved was marked as "E" drive.
5 - I am not sure about this. I kept getting a message that "path was not found." Are there supposed to be 2 spaces between the letters and words in those commands. I tried copying and pasting, 2 spaces like you had between letters/numbers and I also tried 1 space between them. It just didn't work right, The E drive still shows up in disk management. How can we check it?
6 - I deleted what I had on the SSD ( a clean install of Win 7 and Office 2010 Professional Plus plus a zillion updates. The SSD also had 2 clones of the HD.)

Below is a snip of the disk management.

I didn't get to this cloning point. I stopped like you told me because I couldn't finish the above.. .

From elevated command prompt
Even if it failes, do the clone process. Post disk management screenshot afterwards.
then:

Now boot from Windows 7 repair disc or Windows 7 install dvd and perform "startup repair" 3 times with reboots in between.
Startup Repair

This was not successful. It failed.


Cloning went fine. Used Macrium with alignment checked and used whole disk like you suggested.

This went OK, but there are problems. I ran startup repair 3 times each with SSD and hard drive. Now on startup, it won't start unless I use Win 7 installation disk. I get the following error message:
File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data.

Below is a snip of disk management after cloning. Can we fix this?

in screenshot you posted I see you're bootong from disk 1 C. That's new disk isn't it? how did you do that beacuse that's OK!! You didn't have a problem whatn making the screenhot. When did you have that bcd error?

system still boots?

I got the bcd error after cloning and trying to start the system up.

It had to do a startup repair, but it booted up after this last change in command prompt.

When it starts up, I get a black screen with two "Windows 7 Ultimate (recovered)" choices in white print. They appear like this:
Windows 7 Ultimate (recovered)
Windows 7 Ultimate (recovered)

The first option has the hard drive starting first and with the second option, the SSD boots up. I just looked in "boot priority order" and the SSD isn't listed as a choice like earlier. How do we fix it so that the SSD boots up first? The C drive is the SSD and the F drive is the hard drive. E is system reserved. See snips. Should we move "E system reserved" from the hard drive to the SSD? The boot order is unchanged from how you told me to set it:
cd/dvd
....
....
....
esata
harddisk
network

Boot to Windows 7 ultimate SSD (so not HDD!). Now do in Elevated Command Prompt

Try to reboot. Iy eiter boots succesfully... that's fine. Or it doesn't boot at all. If not booting at all.
Boot from DVD->command prompt.


If it does boot with "system reserved" inactive, but gives an error.. post back error. and do a startup repair 3 times.

I did both commands as you suggested. They went well. I did 3 startup repairs each on the HD and the SSD.

When it starts up, it gives me two choices as to what boots up. They are:
Windows 7 Ultimate (restored) {actually the HD}
Windows 7 Ultimate (restored) {actually the SSD}

The HD is the first choice and the SSD is the second. Can this be reversed?

The 100MB partition is on the HD. Should it be on the SSD?

Below are snips of partition wizard and diskpart. Notice the free space info shown in diskpart. There is a snip of disk management too.

Thank you so very much for helping me with this project!

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