SSD - Install and Transfer the Operating System

Katsumoto said:

whs said:

To make things easy and safe, you may want to consider using the Paragon Migration tool which is linked in the tutorial. Yes that would be an extra $19.95 but it does the job with 2 clicks and you do not have to worry about any of the traps mentioned in 1,2,3.

Hello WHS,

A great tutorial and the support you have provided to the forumers here would not have gone to waste had you been part of Paragon! (ie. I wish you worked for them)

I had bought Migrate OS to SSD on the suggestion of another website (and then from this thread) nearly two days ago, but it's given me nothing but grief and was a wholy unsuccessful venture. I've asked for a refund (my thread on their support forum has gone unanswered) and has left my computer performing sluggishly.

This is not a complaint post, but I would implore those reading this thread to read through some of the threads over at their support forum first, prior to purchase, for similarities of rig set-up, in case they are confronted with similar potential problems.

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?

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.

sonshi said:

does this tutorial apply to laptops or just desktops?

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.

SenGruber said:

Following this thread I have been trying to copy my win7 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 - I think that screwed it up

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.

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.

mjf said:

Katsumoto said:

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 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)

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.