Switching To SSD Questions

seavixen32 · 17 Mar 2012

DamageIncM said:

ignatzatsonic said:

You are over-complicating this.

You will never know if you succeeded if you have 2 drives connected.

Disconnect the old drive.

Does the PC then boot? Yes or no.

If yes, it's booting from the SSD since the SSD is the only drive connected.

If no, either do the clone again or try System Repair.

OK, see, I do not know these basic things. I just thought it HAD to have the C-letter or it wouldn't have the ability to boot anyway.

I'll try to copy it again and instantly try to boot with it on its own.

By the way, I don't need to change anything in the BIOS since it's an SSD?
I read something about changing the IDE-setting... But not sure if it was necessary.

seavixen32 said:

Partition Wizard really is your best bet to sort out your partitioning needs.

Free Partition Magic alternative. Free Partition Manager Software for Windows 7/VISTA/XP/2000 and Windows Server 2003/2008/2000.

Once you've downloaded the ISO and burned it to disc you can boot into it and sort your drives out.

Just make any changes you need when you've booted into PW, apply the changes, and then boot back into Windows on completion.

Then I'll try this afterwards, cause it sounds really handy.

Thanks for your patience with my incompetence on this. XD

Your BIOS needs to be set to AHCI for your SSD and not IDE, because IDE will impact on the drive's performance.

whs · 17 Mar 2012

There's reluctance because I have no clue...

That is what you said and I think you are right. You do not understand the concept. So let me explain:

When you turn the PC on, the BIOS loads from the motherboard. That BIOS looks for the MBR (Master Boot Record) on the disk that you have designated as boot disk. The MBR is always in the first 512 bytes of any disk, so the BIOS knows where to look.

In the MBR, there is a pointer to the 'active' partition. There can only be one active partition on each disk. This active partition contains the bootmgr. It can be the same partition as the one that contains the OS (e.g. C:\), but it can also be any other partition with any letter or no letter at all. It is even possible that the active partition and the partition containing the OS reside on different disks.

That bootmgr contains the BCD (Boot Configuration Data) - and there can be several BCDs in case you have a double boot or triple boot system. But even in that case, there is only one bootmgr. The BCD with the help of a few other components (ntldr, winload) pull the OS in starting with the kernel, the hal.dll and the registry hive.

Now how does that help you with your problem? You have to first find out which partition is the active partition - that's where the bootmgr is. If it is not the OS partition on your SSD, then you have a problem. It can be fixed but depending on the configuration it may require different steps.

For an analysis of your configuration, I suggest you load Free Download Magic Partition Manager Software - Partition Wizard Online and take a picture of the screen where all this is visible: