Win 7 clone to new WD HD Fails

good afternoon all,
First time poster so plz bear with me....

- as seen in my specs, I have a 640GB system drive that I wanted to upgrade to a WD10EZEX
- my Dell Studio only has options for ATA and RAID in BIOS. Currently running in ATA mode
- tried an Acronis clone onto the new drive. seemed to work until I booted into Win7 the first time and after loading a driver for the new hard disk, asked for a reboot and then failed with a BSOD 7b
- tried a C: Drive only image from oroiginal and restore to new WD with same results
- Verified that new WD drive shows up in BIOS correctly and is prioritized correctly
- tried Startup Repair, FIXMbr, Fixboot and BCDedit to no avail
- Tried adding the WD drive as the extended drive alongside the 640GB. I made one large logical partition out of it and it seemed to work fine except that I got Yellow Exclamations in device manager. I pointed the error to the driver store and it picked up the "Generic Volume" driver and seemed to fix itself. I thought I had it.
- I reconfigured but This time I cloned the 640 -> new WD with the WD Acronis tool
- When it entered windows for the first time, it recognized and added the driver for the new WD drive. BEFORE I rebooted the machine, I went to device manager and saw the exclamation points and again pointed the error to pick up the Generic Volume Driver which it did and seemed to fix.
- I did the required reboot and once again slammed by the BSOD 7b...(sigh)
- BTW, I did all the same on a second NEW WD10EZEX (bought 2) and all above happened identically...

For some reason, whatever Win7 does to the drive when it recognizes it in the Windows environment, screws it up at the next boot....

Hopefully you guys can help me out...
thx
bama

Did you tell the Acronis cloning app to include Track0 and mark the Win7 partition (or 100mb System Reserved if you had that) Active?

To repair a clone or image that won't boot, unplug all other HD's including the source, Mark Partition Active the 100mb System Reserved (preferred if you have it) or C partition then run Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times.

If these fail I would unplug all other HD's and Clean Install Windows 7 to the target HD using the latest official installer from Windows 7 Direct Download Links

Drivers are never needed to be supplied for modern HD's. If an installer or Repair CD prompts for one it usually means the installation/repair media is bad.

@gregrocker - I will have to go back and double check the track issue....This morning I went in and booted with Disk Director and checked both drives....The initial is the ~50MB volume, next is the Recovery (Z:) volume and then the C: Volume. They are all primary but only C:\ is marked active. Besides the fact that Acronis increased the size proportionally of the new disk, it is exactly identical to the one that works.

I have run the Startuprepair 3X but it wont work...Of course that was only with the C:\ drive active and not the reserve...

@Kaktussoft - I will check out your link...thx

The WD10EZEX is a SATA3 HDD, is old HDD SATA3 or SATA2?

theog said:

The WD10EZEX is a SATA3 HDD, is old HDD SATA3 or SATA2?

Old one is SATA2. New one is sata3
Thx

Did you connect the cloned drive to another SATA slot?

I think I only ever connected the new drive to SATA0..but I did it both by itself as well as with the other secondary drive I have