Cannot boot from SSD after windows partition cloning

gregrocker said:

I do not know why the the imaged SSD is booting as G and have never seen that before. It must have been the Logical source partition, unless you went into Advanced Settings before imaging and changed the default from Auto drive letter.

I did not change the drive letter before imaging. It was Auto.

gregrocker said:

That it booted as non-Gen after you disconnected the others makes me think you have a rare case where drive letter slips during imaging that results in Blue Screen Non-Gen lockout, which is resolved here: Moving Win7 Partition to Another Drive

Thanks, I will look at that.

gregrocker said:

I also notice that you have the Paging File on XP which makes me think you've done other things we don't know about. Turn off the paging file and then turn it back on System Managed on G: Change Virtual Memory Paging File

Ok, but I can't imagine why the page file location is relevant.

gregrocker said:

One thing you could try as suggested is to convert the source Win7 drive to Primary before imaging so that you're imaging a Primary partition lettered C which I've never seen Macrium transfer via image to any other than C.

This has to be critical. Should I use Partition Wizard to mark my WIN7 partition as primary? (I am afraid to play with my original partition)

gregrocker said:

Are you changing anything else you're not telling us?

I haven't changed anything since I started this thread.

Remarkable.

I still feel this probably has something to do with the fact that your original Win7 on the spinner was in a "logical" partition when you cloned (or imaged out and back) it to the SSD.

Leave your third drive disconnected. Reconnect the spinner.

Assuming you have your current spinner Win7 backed up anyway (on the intermediate drive as a "system image" backup, from your most recent image out and back approach), how about this for an idea: back on the spinner, what if we changed your Win7 C partition from "logical" to "primary" with Partition Wizard, and then try to clone it again over to the SSD. That will address my concern about this being relevant.


You need to put the BIOS back again one more time, to have the spinner as drive #1 in the boot sequence.

Then boot to Win7, run Partition Wizard, change C from "logical" to "primary". Partition Wizard will probably not complete the function immediately (since you're booted to C) but will prompt you to let it restart Windows. It will then kick in at boot time, to complete your operation. When finished it will continue on in the boot sequence, and you should then come up under Win7 on the spinner as C, with that partition now being "primary".

WinXP should still be F and "primary", and D and E should still be "logical". Only C will have been made "primary".

Now let's once again try the cloning of what now is a "primary" C over to the SSD. Again, using EasyBCD first delete the existing boot menu entry for the existing Win7_New partition on the SSD. Then use Partition Wizard to actually delete that partition from the SSD.

And then use Macrium Reflect to clone primary C over to the SSD as primary Win7_New. Again, use EasyBCD to add the Win7_New partition on SSD to the boot menu. Remember, we're booted to the spinner's WinXP as the "active" boot partition, so the boot menu we're playing with using EasyBCD is the boot menu in the WinXP partition.

Don't user "backup/repair" to change the boot drive to be SSD with EasyBCD. Just leave it alone just as it is, with the spinner being the intended boot drive, ... same as it is first in the BIOS boot sequence.

So now we have spinner and SSD connected, third drive disconnected. Primary Win7 (C) on spinner has been cloned onto SSD (also primary). Boot menu in WinXP partition has entries for both WinXP, Win7 (on spinner), and Win7_New (on SSD). I don't care if Win7_2 is on the menu or not, as long as that third drive is disconnected.

Now reboot, which will be to the spinner's "active" WinXP partition and its updated boot menu. Select Win7_New on SSD and see what happens. Does it boot? Do you come up as C, or not?

Having only one HD and the SSD connected, I booted from the HD to WIN7.
Using Partition Wizard I changed C from logical to primary.
After rebooting twice, C is now primary in Disk Management.
Using EasyBCD I deleted the menu entry for WIN7_NEW.
Using Partition Wizard I deleted WIN7_NEW.
Using Macrium Reflect (and having changed only the alignment setting), I am now cloning WIN7 to the SSD (at 13% now).

Fingers crossed.

gregrocker said:

I corrected the link for the Paragon fix for drive letter slippage . It is rare that our forums' links decay over time.

Are you sure the link is correct? It leads to the first post of a 5 pages thread.

gregrocker said:

Paging file is only relevant because it shouldn't be on the partition of an old XPired OS.

I had WIN7 page file in another partition/drive to save space and to boost performance (since I just use that windowsXP installation for testing purposes only).

George300 said:

I had WIN7 page file in another partition/drive to save space and to boost performance (since I just use that windowsXP installation for testing purposes only).

On a spinner, the different partitions are located at different locations on the spinning platters. So if the read-head/arm mechanism is somewhere over the C-partition for Win7, and it then needs to move to the pagefile for a reason, the mechanism will need to move to that pagefile.sys located in the WinXP partition... which is a ways away from where the Win7 partition is located on the platter. And then when done and it needs to get back to where the Win7 C-partition is again, the arm again needs to move back.

So there's actually arm motion which is unnecessarily large, when you have the page file located in a different partition than C on the same hard drive.

Now if you had two drives, and you put the page file in a partition on the second drive (which of course has its own separate arm mechanism for that second drive's platters), well now the C-arm can just sit where it is on the first drive and the pagefile arm can sit where it is on the second drive, and now it really is "efficient". But that's because you moved the page file off of the drive that has Windows on it, to a second drive. These are the mechanics of spinning platters, and the read/arm mechanism that has to move to get to the location of the file being sought.

With only one drive (spinner), your "best" arrangement is simply to leave the page file in the C-partition. That will minimize arm motion.

I had had the page file in the second HDD.

George300 said:

I had had the page file in the second HDD.

I see. So you had it in WinXP_2, on that other HDD. Ok.

Anyway, what happened with the clone-to-SSD process? You were at 13% quite a while ago. Did that ever complete? And if so, I can't wait to hear what the results were of booting to Win7_New on the SSD showed for the drive letter?