migtating OS from platter drive to SSD

[LMHmedchem]

I will be installing an SSD drive on Monday or Tuesday and I would like to know if there is a writeup for restoring an image created from a platter drive to an SSD drive. I tried this once before and didn't have any luck. It was a brand new build, so I just re-installed on the SSD and didn't look into it any further. I have a carefully maintained bank of images and would really like to avoid a full re-install.

One issue I ran into was that I needed to manually create an offset on the SSD to install a 32-bit OS. Does anyone know if this is still required? The partitions were not the same size when I tried before, but I thought that would not matter since the partition on the drive being written to was larger. I even tried with bit by bit copy, but that didn't work either.

Anyway, can anyone here give me some advice, or direct me to existing documentation?

Thanks,

LMHmedchem

[Steven Shiau]

"create an offset on the SSD to install a 32-bit OS." -> Could you please provide more info about this? Is this something to do with WD Advanced Format? Or?

Steven.

[LMHmedchem]

This is the link to the instructions I used, I think,
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?48366-How-to-Align-OCZ-SSD-in-XP-using-USB-SATA-and-Vista-recovery-disk&s=80a2c4b186990f3cabfbdce815498d58&p=326656#post326656

This was a while ago. I had set up a new build, but the SSD had not arrived so I installed the OS on a platter drive so I could get working on it. When the SSD arrived, I tried to transfer the OS using Clonezilla, which I use regularly. I tried a clone, even the bib by bit copy method, and also to restore from an image. If I recall, Clonezilla completed, but Windows would not boot. The MOBO could not find a partition to boot from. I found that I could not even use the XP disk to create a partition and install XP, the same failure resulted. Apparently, what is necessary is to manually create an offset in sectors. This may be related to XP being 32 bit, since I think you can use either 32 or 64 as the offset. I don't think I was able to get Diskpar to work and ended up using a tool on the Win7 install CD instead, but I had to create this offset before I got a partition I could install in. With the XP cd, I would create a partition and format it, but then the cd could not identify any partitions so install in and kept asking me to create a new one. I am sorry this explanation is fuzzy, but it was a year ago or so and I didn't mess around with Clonezilla too much to try to solve the problem. It seemed simpler to just re-install after I got the offset done and not add a second application to the mix.

I will be doing the same thing soon, but this time the OS is very mature an tweaked, so I would really rather not start from scratch.

LMHmedchem

[Steven Shiau]

LMHmedchem,
Thanks. If you find anything new or have any conclusion, please tell us. Appreciate that.

Steven.

[LMHmedchem]

This has not worked as of yet. I have implemented the following steps.
1. Did a manual conversion to AHCI by the following,
http://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=a621727c4e17e28a7ab12865ff286705&topic=106575.0
This worked fine and my OS boots after the change. Th AHCI bios recognizes all of my drives and such.
2. Updated SSD to latest firmware (1.24) using the OCZ sandforce update tool, ssdupdate.exe. This seemed to proceed correctly and there were no hitches.
3. Made an image of the OS after the change to AHCI.
4. Booted from a Vista install CD and created a partition on the SSD. This is to get a partition that is properly aligned, which native XP partitions are not. This was done according to,
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_set_up_Windows_on_a_VERTEX
The method used was to create a partition, format it, and then power off. There didn't seem to be any problem with this.
5. Write the image to the new partition. This also seemed to go fine.
6. Install the SSD in the rig. I installed using the same SATA port as the current boot drive.
The AHCI bios recognizes that there is an SSD as drive 0, but I get a boot loader failure and the OS won't boot. I have tried supergrub to see if there is a MBR problem, but that didn't work. I am not sure if I used it correctly, I usually use it for Linux problems.
...so, either the image didn't copy over, the drive isn't working, there is still a problem with the partition, or there is a problem with GRUB or the MBR. I thought it was a good time to post instead of spending many more hours fishing around in the weeds.
[color=#000090][b]LMHmedchem[/b][/color]

[Steven Shiau]

"but I get a boot loader failure and the OS won't boot." -> What were the error messages?

Steven.

[LMHmedchem]

It just says, "Boot disk failure, please load system disk".<br />
<br />
If there was something wrong with the SSD, I would have expected clonezilla to not be able to write the image to it. Do you think there is something wrong with the partition, the MBR, etc? The partition on the SSD is larger than the partition from which the image was taken, but I don't know why that would be a problem. Do you think I should clone the disk instead of saving it to an image and then restoring the image to the SSD?<br />
<br />
LMHmedchem

[Steven Shiau]

"Do you think I should clone the disk instead of saving it to an image and then restoring the image to the SSD?" -> Maybe. You can give it a try.
BTW, if boot loader is an issue, maybe you can check this:
http://drbl.sourceforge.net/faq/fine-print.php?path=./2_System/23_Missing_OS.faq#23_Missing_OS.faq

Steven.