Boot problem on cloned dual-boot SSD

I went and purchased a Western Digital Blue Mobile 1TB SATA HDD to do this experiment.

Using Macrium Reflex 7, I cloned my original HDD to this new HDD (I was brave, I resized both the Win7 and XP partitions to fill the disk). Then I regedit'ed the cloned XP partition's system hive to fix the DosDevices\C and DosDevices\D entries because Macrium did not do that. The cloned disk booted both Win7 and XP successfully!

I then did another experiment. I deleted the partitions on the new HDD, and cloned the (previously cloned, but with non-booting XP) SSD to it. I also had to fix the DosDevices entries here. And both Win7 and XP booted successfully on this HDD too!

So the original clone from the HDD to the SSD was completely good as far as the data goes. But somehow XP fails to boot when it's on this SSD. This narrows the problem down to the SSD itself. I am quite baffled. Win7 has no trouble booting off this SSD, only XP fails. Yet when booted XP on the HDD, the SSD works fine as an external drive. Is the SSD "too fast" as the boot drive for XP? A timing issue?

I hate to give up on this SSD, it is indeed a much faster drive and boots very quickly compared to the HDD.

amblabs said:

I cloned the (previously cloned, but with non-booting XP) SSD to it. I also had to fix the DosDevices entries here. And both Win7 and XP booted successfully on this HDD too!

Cloning the unbootable SSD was a clever idea, and your success points to the topic I was bringing up the other day that xp may not like the hdd driver for the ssd. As you may know when windows does not boot after swapping motherboards with the same boot disk its most always due to the disk controller driver, and the solution is to go back and switch to the generic disk controller driver for the hard drive using the original disk, then try the swap a second time.

So knowing that gives me this idea: go back into the original setup and boot into WinXp from the hdd with the ssd installed as a second drive, then go into device manager and select the boot drive's disk controller and choose Update Driver, then select Browse my computer for drivers, then Let me choose from a list, then proceed to change the driver to the generic driver for winxp. On win7 I think its called Standard AHCI driver 1.1, something like that, not sure about xp. Then reboot into win7 and clone to the ssd again (or just clone the whole drive directly from xp. It would be funny if that ended up being the key here, cloning from xp instead of win7) Do not boot into winxp again as it may re-install the original xp controller driver and replace the generic. This is essentially the way one makes a windows hard drive able to boot from a variety of motherboards by giving windows a drive controller driver its most comfortable with. We would not think you would need to do that here because you're using the same motherboard so why on earth would we want to use a different disk controller driver, but you have been working at this for a while so why not try everything.

Obviously if that does not work, there is also the option of changing the disk driver itself as opposed to the disk controller driver, using a similar method. I have never done that and can't suggest why it would work, but its another idea.

I have not gone back to read this whole thread so I assume you have already covered the topic of partition alignment (another way an SSD is different than an HDD), but that's something else to look into if not. Macrium discusses how to override its own clone defaults here. (I wonder if macrium is not realizing there is an xp clone involved here because you've been cloning from within win7?)
Partition Alignment

@johnhoh
Thanks, I will try what you suggest and see what happens.

As for partition alignment, In my several attempts to clone the HDD to the SSD, I have chosen both aligned and not. When I originally cloned with Acronis True Image and EaseUS Todo Backup, I made sure the XP partition was aligned to 1MB boundary. When I tried Macrium the first time, I chose to clone the HDD exactly, which resulted in an unaligned XP partition (CHS). I have also tried Macrium with an aligned XP partition (Vista/7/SSD). In all cases XP failed to boot. As I understand it, an unaligned partition will simply create a performance hit because it generates lots more disk I/O, but it shouldn't cause a boot failure.

@johnhoh
I tried to do as you suggested but am not getting anywhere. This laptop is an AMD-based machine and the closest thing to a disk controller that I could find in XP's device manager is under "SCSI and RAID controllers" > "AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller", as shown below:



If I right click on it and select "Update driver...", Select "No, not this time" about connecting to Windows Update, select "Install from a list ofr specific location (Advanced)", browse removable media and include D:\WINDOWS\system32, it gives me this:


@SIW2
Since I have an AMD machine, not Intel, is the article you linked still relevant?

amblabs said:

@johnhoh
I tried to do as you suggested but am not getting anywhere. This laptop is an AMD-based machine and the closest thing to a disk controller that I could find in XP's device manager is under "SCSI and RAID controllers" > "AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller", as shown below:

A key point on the page shown by SIW2 is that you want to run in ahci mode, not raid. I'm assuming you are not running raid but the fact that your amd driver says raid in the title while not saying ahci in the title is kind of weird. I looked at MSI's support page for your board and there are two chipset drivers, the one you have which says raid and the one below which says ahci. I would install the one below and see if it installs and if so does it produce a bootable clone. No idea if this will work, we're just trying everything here. If it does not install you may need to uninstall the current raid driver and then manually navigate to the location on your board that contains the driver in the link below.

Download MSI CR630 Notebook ATI RS880M Chipset/VGA Driver 8.720 for Windows 7, Windows 7 64 bit

As I mentioned in my earlier post, you might also try installing macrium within winxp and then cloning from winxp, as another thing to try

johnhoh said:

A key point on the page shown by SIW2 is that you want to run in ahci mode, not raid. I'm assuming you are not running raid but the fact that your amd driver says raid in the title while not saying ahci in the title is kind of weird.

I am running in AHCI mode. The BIOS only provides two choices - "AHCI" or "IDE".
The XP driver is called "AMD AHCI Compatible RAID driver". It does say AHCI and RAID, but I think "RAID" is irrelevant here.

I looked at MSI's support page for your board and there are two chipset drivers, the one you have which says raid and the one below which says ahci. I would install the one below and see if it installs and if so does it produce a bootable clone. No idea if this will work, we're just trying everything here. If it does not install you may need to uninstall the current raid driver and then manually navigate to the location on your board that contains the driver in the link below.

Download MSI CR630 Notebook ATI RS880M Chipset/VGA Driver 8.720 for Windows 7, Windows 7 64 bit

That's a Win7 driver, not for XP... ???

As I mentioned in my earlier post, you might also try installing macrium within winxp and then cloning from winxp, as another thing to try

OK, maybe worth a try.

amblabs said:

That's a Win7 driver, not for XP... ???

its the same driver that's on the MSI site for XP. Perhaps it contains both versions and detects your OS to see which one to install. In any case, here the MSI XP link. Its the second driver under chipset.

Support For CR630 | Laptops - The best gaming laptop provider | MSI Global

Note sure if you have seen this, it has some xp ssd driver downloads plus tips for installing xp on an ssd
Installing Windows Xp on SSD disk - WindowsPRO.eu