Forgive me for being so dense but after looking at the link and watching the video, I am still confused. It appears that the drive has to be a spare drive, so that means that the SSD has to be moved to a different SATA connection and I have to put back my old drive to make the clone from and boot from that drive to accomplish this. Can someone just explain it to me VERY SLOWLY as to why reinstalling windows on the SSD and allowing it to reformat the drive to the proper size and then restoring it from the restore image will not work. Quite frankly I don't have the confidence that I can accomplish the currently outlined method and might just live with what I have rather than screw it up completely. Thanks again for your patience and help.
Tom
Because
Window's 7 backup and other backup programs image the whole drive, including the free unformated space before any partition. By alignment, it means that you are creating your first partition after the 63rd sector or the 1023rd sector or any other setup that makes it aligned. The point is there has to be a predetermined amount of free space before the fire partition to ensure that it is aligned.
If you were to simply reinstall windows, it will not delete any existing partition but will just install itself on the already misaligned partition. Misaligned means it's not starting at the proper sector.
If you were to delete all the partitions, then reinstall Windows, it will create a partition for you, which will be aligned and it's fine until there. But when you restore the image, it will restore the whole drive back to how it was before. It doesn't matter what partitions you've already aligned on the drive.
Alignment refers to the position of a partition, not some physical property of the drive. So when you restore restore the image, you're restoring one or more of the misaligned partitions back to the drive.
Now you could back an image of just the misaligned partition and attempt to restore it onto an aligned partition. The success of this depends on how the backup program works. If it simply write the data bit to bit in order on the new partition, then it stays aligned. But if it deletes the partition and creates a new partition to write the image on, it depends if the software creates the new partition aligned or not