Windows 7: SSD - Install and Transfer the Operating System

Introduction

If you never owned an SSD, you have missed something. Yes, they are not cheap, but Dollar per Dollar there...

I wonder what went wrong. I used the Paragon Migration tool 6 times now - 4 times on my own systems and twice on friend's systems. It worked flawlessly each time.

Can you describe the problems you encountered?

Hello whs,

I (and my brother) honestly thought it would all work out fine. I had wanted only Windows to go on the SSD, so I opted for the OCZ Agility 3 60gb. The only hurdle was we could not remember if we had installed AHCI on my Sandy Bridge, so we checked put the tutorial on this forum to enable it - but we saw in step three, that the parameter was set at '0' already (I can't seem to find the link to the tutorial at the moment, the OP has three words as his handle here). So there was no way that any AHCI drivers could be downloaded. So I purchased the software from Paragon.

Selected only the Windows folder and one or two more things (like locale and one or two more things). It calculated it all, said it was all fine and proceeded to do its thing. At just over 30% or thereabouts, it asked for a restart, which I duly did and then came up with an error (link to error will follow shortly).

Played about with BIOS to disable AHCI etc etc. But the same error would show up. Had my brother (more PC adept than I) go through your your tutorial and we went trawled through the net for similar problems. Nothing.

I ended up going through the related Paragon forums where someone who had the same problem as me had posted some three months ago. However, he was asked to do something which may not have helped his predicament at all. He got fed up, and he just demanded his money back and so the problem remained unresolved.

I also asked for help from there, but nothing was was forthcoming.

The related thread as follows (sorry, typing from a tablet, so my details here may remain a little scant):

Same error as previous member - Wilders Security Forums

I'm the only poster in that thread (Bodie_CI5), and my specs are given in the thread (more or less).



There I showed the two errors I came up against, but I'm still to receive any assistance.

There is no way I could've gotten as far as I did

I suspect your problem stems from the fact that you let the PMT reduce the size of your data. I always make sure that my data fits on appr. 50% of the SSD.
Suggest you reduce the size of your data before you make the migration. I am pretty certain that this would work.

PS: AHCI should play no role in that. This is more of an SSD performance question.

I tried all differing combinations but the same errors occurred for some reason. I mean, the point is somewhat moot as I have since uninstalled the program (single use only), it was more so that people be prepared for some difficulty with the software, in terms of support.

I will be trying your manual installation instead, hopefully tonight.

You're a top asset though, that was the other I tried stating in my previous post.

does this tutorial apply to laptops or just desktops?

Following this thread I have been trying to copy my Windows 7 installation onto my new SSD and have been having quite a bit of bad luck. Hopefully someone here is able and willing to help.

I did not start with the advice here, but stumbled on it partway through the process, which may be the source of my problems, but I'm really not sure. I have a laptop with a 750G HDD and a bay for a second hard drive. First I created 2 new partitions on the SSD using GParted, a 100MB system partition and a 110G main partition. I used Macrium Free to copy over the contents of the equivalent partitions from my HDD (the C: drive being about 90GB out of 270). The SSD drive would not boot and requested a windows recovery disk to fix things. I do not have one, so I read more and found this thread.

I tried to bring the SSD back to its factory state, though at this point I can't remember what utility I used to do that. I then followed the instructions in this thread

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk 1
Create partition primary size=100 align=1024
Create partition primary align=1024

and the suggested check routine looked as it was supposed to. I then used Macrium to first initialize the MBR and then to make individual images of the System and C: drives, saving the images on the D: partition of the HDD. I burned a Macrium boot recovery CD as prompted when I started the program. When I loaded up the restore program from the bootable CD it was unable to locate the SSD. The related file explorer could find the drives, but told me they were not formated NTFS. I went back into Windows7, opened Disk Management and formatted the 2 SSD partitions into NTFS, but when I went back to restore the images to it Macrium still didn't recognize the partitions.

I tried one final thing, just cloning the partitions directly in Windows7 as I had originally. This time the drive got farther in the booting process, not telling me that I needed a recovery disk, but it did stop at a blue screen and told me that my copy of Windows is not genuine (it is). Where do I go from here? I assume that I need to wipe the SSD again and start over. Is there a best way to do that? How can I get the bootable Macrium Recovery program to recognize the SSD and let me restore the images to them?

Thank you for any and all assistance.

I am a little confused with the license terms. You suggest it's a one shot deal?

WHS can you shed some light on the licensing constraints - I can't get a clear understanding from the Paragon Website.

Also, Drive Copy 11 Professional
Paragon Drive Copy - Professional Hard Disk Copy, Disk Cloning and System Migration - deploy new hard drive easily!
seems to do the same transfer plus other separate attractive capabilities

Anyone like to comment (yes it's $40 as opposed to $20)

It applies to both. Except with laptops you need an external enclosure to setup the SSD - unless you have one of those rare 17" laptops with 2 disk bays.

1. see my comment in red in the quote

2. I think you are dying on the difficulties with the 100MB partition. I suggest you use EasyBCD to transfer the bootmgr from the 100MB partition to C (see picture). Do that on the HDD before you start the imaging of your C partition on the HDD with Macrium.

3. Then you run those commands on the SSD, but no size parameter

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk n (where n is the number that was given for your SSD in List disk)
Clean
Create partition primary align=1024
Active
Exit

This will create on big partition over your whole SSD into which you can restore the image that you took after you moved the MBR. Important: Prerequisite is that the partition on the HDD from where you imaged was no bigger than the partition on the SSD. If you then still cannot boot, you might have to fix the MBR with the bootable CD of Partition Wizard. With all the operations you did on the SSD, no way of knowing in what shape the MBR is.

I have used the program several times on different systems (and in different countries - lol) and it has always worked. I interpret "single license" as allowed for the same person. That may be a bit stretched, but it works.