Cloning a windows 7 O/S from a hard drive to an SSD drive.

[Crumbleey]

Hi People.

I've got myself into a bit of a fix.

I have a SanDisk Ultra II SSD drive.

I formatted the SSD drive to give a fresh start to a clean install. Probably a mistake because it cleared all the data, partitions etc.

I had tried to install Win7 on to the SSD before the formatting but that try failed.

I have tried to install winows7 directly onto the SSD drive, but that didn't work. The resulting windows operating system kept falling over with DLL's not found when starting up and after installing one DLL it finally managed to start but it took three hours to do so.

I then tried a different approach.

I replaced the SSD drive with the old hard disk which had a flakey Win7 operating system on it.

I ran CHKDSK on the hard disk which found no errors.

I then successfully installed Win7 onto the hard disk and it put the old Win7 into a Windows.old folder which I am moving to an expansion drive.

The Win7 on the hard disk is looking fine and stable even after some 6 hours testing everything I can think of.

That should leave me with just the Win7 ready to clone onto the SSD drive.

Question1 - will cloning from the hard drive to the SSD drive put everything on the SSD drive, ie partitions, folders data programs ie absolutely everything?

Question2 - will everything previously on the SSD drive get over written?

Question3 - how do I create a bootable CD/DVD with the cloning application on it?

I am hoping to have the hard disk connected via an external USB enclosure. The SSD drive in the laptop bay. Then boot up from the cloning CD/DVD and clone the contents of the hard drive to the SSD drive.

Any advice welcome.

Regards.

Crumbleey.

 

[whs]

Have a look at this tutorial. I have written it a while ago but maybe it can help.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/149969-ssd-install-transfer-operating-system.html

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
I wouldn't clone a "flakey hdd" (as you put it) install to a new ssd
For one it will clone all of the imperfections of the hdd

I'd just look at the failure to install the os clean to the ssd.
Which clean and reformat the ssd with the same tutorial posted.
Let us know what happens.

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk n (where n is the number that was given for your SSD in List disk)
Clean
Create partition primary size=100 align=1024
Format fs=ntfs quick
Active
Exit

 

[whs]

Nice copy job Mike, LOL

 

[ThrashZone]

Nice tutorial Wolfgang