Clone to SSD won't boot, now I have a "hybrid" system

holmes4 said:

I tried SIW2's suggestions, but they made no difference in the behavior. I then tried Robert's (iseeuu) idea of a fresh install on the SSD and then restoring the previous image. When I did this with the image of the SSD, I got to a strange state where it booted and let me log in, but then brought me to a blank blue desktop with "This copy of Windows is not genuine" in the lower right. Nothing else appeared on the screen and all I could do was shut down. Finally I restored a copy of the original WD image, the one that had shown as C in my "Frankenstein" mode, and that worked just fine.

One curious thing I noted was that in the Frankenstein mode, while the system appeared to be running properly, deep down it was very conflicted. This was evidenced by my getting Windows Installer errors any time I tried to install or uninstall a product.

Thank you all - I now have Windows installed properly on the SSD - my hard disk WEI rating went from 5.9 to 7.2 - and the system feels much snappier.

I do have one residual question. When I did the new install as Robert suggested, the System Reserved partition was created as I expected. What I didn't expect was that it would have a drive letter assigned to it - I had not seen that in my past installs on an empty disk. Is there any harm to removing the drive letter for that partition, or should I just leave it alone?

There is no harm done by removing the drive letter. Windows installs do not assign a letter to the system partition.

How a final snapshot of your working disk manager?

Cheers!
Robert

Here's the final snapshot. I moved some drive letters around to match a previous configuration. U is the old system which I will delete after I have redone my backups, and that second reserved partition was created when I installed fresh onto the WD disk. Thanks again.

holmes4 said:

Here's the final snapshot. I moved some drive letters around to match a previous configuration. U is the old system which I will delete after I have redone my backups, and that second reserved partition was created when I installed fresh onto the WD disk. Thanks again.

Looks good! Glad you got it nailed down!!

Happy surfing!
Robert