Hard drive cloning

[barryl]

I ran into some interesting problems this week and George suggested I share them with the forum.

Background: my son alerted me to the fact that SIDS (Solid State Drives) have become very cheap recently (around £100 for 500GB) and they are of course both faster and more reliable than DDS (old fashioned spinning disks). I decided to convert the single HDD on my (rather old) laptop (thinkpad T61) and the system drive on my desktop (a custom build from a local computer company).

It is obviously "easy" to simply open the computer and replace the drive though it takes a bit of knowledge - easily obtainable from the internet and patience but the problem lies in how to copy the data from the old drive to the new one (process known as cloning).

For the laptop I have a caddy which goes into the ultrabay (where the CD/DVD drive normally lives) so it can have two drives simultaneously in place. The thinkpad will boot off the first one it finds that has a system, so I decided to place the old drive in the ultrabay and the new drive in the system and boot a cloning program which I had carefully placed on the old drive (not allowed to copy windows while it is active).

This took 3 days (!!!) and worked and the laptop then booted fine.

(I will put the next installment into a reply)

[barryl]

Next step was to do the same thing for my desktop.

For this  I bought the same SSD as for my laptop (a Crucial 2.5''500GB) a caddy to convert the 2.5'' drive to the 3.5'' width drive bay on a standard PC and a USB to SATA cable to connect the SSD drive as an external drive.

After the first experience I made sure that I did not have unnecessary material on my system drive.

I connected the SSD drive as an external USB drive and booted a cloning program (I think from CD) which would copy the data on my HDD1 to the SSD. I did this one partition at a time instead of cloning the whole drive (this may be significant in the sequel).

I inserted the 2.5 SSD into the 3.5'' caddy (to fit the drive bay) and left the old drive in situ but connected the red SATA connectors to the SSD drive instead so that the system would see the SSD drive instead of the HDD

I then rebooted expecting everything to work just like the laptop did.

Not so simple.....

The first boot said "missing drivers; repair install needed" (which is not totally unexpected) so I booted from the Windows 7 install disk and did the repair, and rebooted

That boot took a long time and finally came up with a totally empty blue screen with  something like
"this is not a genuine windows .. build 7601" in the bottom RH corner.

(more to follow)

[barryl]

Fortunately it was very easy (since I had not removed it) to replug the old HDD drive to research the problem.

I looked on the internet and found this article (among many that describe the problem; seems to be something people fall into regularly)

http://www.anotherwindowsblog.com/2011/02/windows-7-not-genuine-after-disk-c
lone.html

Apparently unless one is excessively careful (as I was by accident when cloning to the SSD for my laptop) windows wil assign incorrect drive letters; inparticular it will not give the system drive the same letter that the BIOS will give it when booting the system. As a result -chaos!

It seems to be necessary to have the new drive in situ and the old drive externally instead of the other way round which is more natural (and that may be an incorrect diagnosis).

However instead of telling you that "something cannot be read " (which is the usual result of an incorrect drive letter and in this case the entire desktop could not be read!) it puts up the "not genuine" message as if it was a pirated copy of Windows.

As desribed in the article from the internet I cited, you have to either install a program from Paragon (who produce excellent software by the way) or manually edit the registry (highly not recommended as it is easy to wreck the system BUT in this case easy enough) to give the windows system partition the drive letter it is expecting.

Once I got up my courage I did that and like magic it worked.

One lesson of course is that when doing this kind of thing (cloning a system onto new hardware, for example) unless you are experienced and competent (and confident!) it is likely to be a lot less hassle to ask a local computer company to do it for you; they have probably already experienced the pitfalls and know what to do to overcome them.