SSD - Install and Transfer the Operating System

Thanks for the tutorial! Even the geeky way seems easy, but unfortunately this has not worked for me after two attempts. Got the SSD partitions aligned, verified. One curveball is that I have a 1200MB SYS DRV partition, then C drive, then a 9 GB Lenovo Restore partition. So, I reasoned I should make the first partition on my SSD (Kingston 96GB SATA 2) 1200MB, but still aligned at 1024KB. This matches the HDD. The 1200MB partition on the HDD says Active & Boot, so I made the 1200MB partition on the SSD active.
I used Macrium for the imaging, gave me no error messages for either the SYS DRV partition or C drive partition. Would not let me assign C drive letter to the partition I want to be C on the SSD, so I assigned no drive letter, hoping it would become C drive when installed in laptop. I did all this with the HDD in the laptop, one external USB HDD to save the images, and the SSD in an external USB HDD enclosure. One red flag: though no error messages, the contents of the second partition on the SSD ended up about 600MB smaller than the contents of the HDD C drive after the image restore. The SYS DRV partition contents size was identical after image restore.
After the image transfer I powered down the laptop and removed battery. Touched pipe in bathroom to discharge any potential static E (like any time I touched the drives or laptop internals). Swapped HDD for SSD, no issues. Powered up and went into BIOS, set SSD to second in order after CD drive (don't have an internal CD drive on this). Saved changes and exited BIOS. Get a flashing underscore that lasts forever and ever. Restarted, got the perpetual flashing underscore.
Things could be worse, I swapped back the HDD and the computer is fine, but I am out of ideas. I had Macrium verify the images before restoring, no issue. I started to switch to AHCI, but DWORD was already 0, so figured that my laptop shipped with AHCI and cancelled out of that. I have a lenovo Thinkpad x120e with Windows 7 pro 64 bit. I have an external optical drive but no Windows install disk. The next step might be to call Lenovo and see if they will give me an install disk. Any thoughts before I do that. Sorry so long-winded, but many hours invested in this now.

Sounds like you did the restore from within Windows - not from the boot media.

Was it a smaller drive you restored to?

Are you using Macrium v4 or v5?

Did you use Roborestore?

How did you measure that 600mb difference?

I expect the best thing to do is to repair the boot files on the SSD from within the windows 7 you can get into.

600MB difference in space used according to the Mini tool partition wizard. And actually, that was when I first did the image. I've tried this whole process twice now, and currently it is a 2.3 GB difference, despite Macrium saying image restore was successful.
I had no boot media.
No roborestore.
Macrium Reflect v4.2
I've noticed the process of attempting to boot with the SSD changes some things. The partitions on my SSD had no drive letters, now they are D and E after having installed it in the laptop. The tail end of the SSD turned into unallocated space, not a lot but annoying, when I originally had the bigger partition going all the way to the end.
The external optical drive came in the mail after I had tried all this so I wasn't thinking of how I could use that. Maybe I need to make a boot disk using that.

I finally got it working using the Lenovo recovery files, burned onto a set of DVD's, one of which had boot media. Instead of imaging it, this restored it to the state of when I first bought it. Having to reinstall some things now.

Wow, that Paragon migration software has caused me P A I N.

Migration completed, rebooted, edited the bios, reboot and get "reboot and select proper boot device". Damn, I think, it didn't work.

Edit the BIOS back to my original hard drive... "reboot and select proper boot device"!!!



A combination of this process http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic162323.html and then windows disk, fixing boot problems has managed to get me back to a workable state, although for some reason I now have the Vista boot loader screen as opposed to Win 7 niceness.

Rebuild from scratch I think. Not a big fan of Paragon right now.

whs said:

Sorry to hear that you are having so much trouble but you must have made a mistake somewhere down the line. I have used that program many times on my own systems and friend's systems and it worked each time.

Really? What mistake is there to make? You only install it, select which drive you're copying your OS too...

It ran fine, then told me to restart changing the BIOS which I did, then I had the problems.