Drive clone attempt isn't working.

I'm a heavy OSX user so I don't know a whole lot about this, but my son uses Windows because he likes to play games. I'm trying to upgrade his boot drive from a 1TB HDD to a 512GB SSD.

Last night I used Norton Ghost to try to make this happen, but after it completed, the SSD is not booting. I swapped it back to the regular HDD and it's fine. So, I suspect I did something wrong since I don't know too much about this.

The top photo shows the settings that I chose in Ghost. I can give an explanation to why I picked those if any one needs to know why.

The bottom photo shows the results of the clone. The top drive is the original 1TB source, the bottom one is the SSD. I had expected Ghost to pull the smallest EFI system partition, but it didn't. The SSD does have enough space for the data.

Can any one help me and tell me what I did wrong?






PS. The recovery partitions on the original drive... I do NOT want those on the SSD. I have a flash drive that I will use to make recovery media. I don't want to waste space on the drive for recovery.

PPS. The source and destination drives were connected to a second PC and were NOT the boot drives.

I tried it once using a bootable disc with a cloning program on it and it cloned but couldn't boot Windows 7, haven't been back to work on it again yet.

watts300 said:

I'm a heavy OSX user so I don't know a whole lot about this, but my son uses Windows because he likes to play games. I'm trying to upgrade his boot drive from a 1TB HDD to a 512GB SSD.

Last night I used Norton Ghost to try to make this happen, but after it completed, the SSD is not booting. I swapped it back to the regular HDD and it's fine. So, I suspect I did something wrong since I don't know too much about this.

The top photo shows the settings that I chose in Ghost. I can give an explanation to why I picked those if any one needs to know why.

The bottom photo shows the results of the clone. The top drive is the original 1TB source, the bottom one is the SSD. I had expected Ghost to pull the smallest EFI system partition, but it didn't. The SSD does have enough space for the data.

Can any one help me and tell me what I did wrong?


View attachment 45557

View attachment 45556


PS. The recovery partitions on the original drive... I do NOT want those on the SSD. I have a flash drive that I will use to make recovery media. I don't want to waste space on the drive for recovery.

PPS. The source and destination drives were connected to a second PC and were NOT the boot drives.

Click to expand...

First off Ghost will not work a UEFI System. I would suggest Macrium Reflect Free addition google it.
2nd UEFI needs these partition to function correctly so do not try to clone only C:\ you need to clone disk 1 to disk 2 The recovery partitions are very small on an 500GB SSD
I would make the Clone on the computer it going on and make sure no other drives are connected UEFI can do some weird stuff on you shouldn't on a clone but why take any chances just put your Original drive on a USB adapter of some sort. Use the MR Boot USB or DVD media to boot and complete the clone.

You might want to use some special software for that.

Free Partition Manager - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard





Otherwise, try Paragon - It isn't free, though.

Paragon Migrate OS to SSD - System migration to Solid State Drives (SSD) - Overview

Considering you may only the migrate feature once, it may be better value to get another product with has migrate to ssd and other features, e.g. Hard Disk Manager Suite ? complete system management | PARAGON Software Group - disk partitioning, resize partition

There are probably several ways you could transfer the data over. But a couple of things deserve special attention.

For Instance, will the drive be configured as GPT for the UEFI install. Obviously Norton is not aware of UEFI. So something needs to set the drive as GPT before any partitions are copied. Some software may be UEFI aware and do the job correctly. I have not tried the one SIW2 recommends, but I know Partition Wizard is not UEFI aware. It the software you are using is not UEFI aware, you may need to set the Drive to GPT using Diskpart, or set it to GPT then remove the MSR partition, if created, since it will be in the wrong position and re-create it in the correct position.

Edit: Sometimes, allowing the software you use to see the drive is in a GPT configuration will help it complete the process in the correct way. I know if you have cleaned a drive with Diskpart and try to recover partitions without first setting the drive back to GPT, the software will think the drive is MBR and try to recover the partitions incorrectly.

When you try to reboot after completing the migration process, remove the other drive and check the bios to make sure the correct Windows Boot manager is being used.