Ghosting a SSD?

Curll

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Jul 13, 2005
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I currently have a 60GB SSD running Win 7.

I have a 120GB SSD installed, doing nothing.

I want to ghost the 60 to 120, upgrade to Win 10.

Use the 60 as either a RAM disk or some sort of cache? Not sure what I could realistically do with it.

Are there any free Ghosting tools?
 

Curll

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Jul 13, 2005
9,205
Thank ye kindly. As you can tell, I haven't done this since I carried Norton Ghost around on a 3.5".
 

santadevil

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djbayko

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Agree with santadevil that the Samsung or other vendor cloning tool is the way to go if your have the option.

Also, be aware that you don't need to ghost your Win 7 installation to the new SSD in order to upgrade to Win 10. As long as your Windows installation is genuine, the key should be stored in your BIOS, and a fresh installation of Win 10 will automatically activate. I realize there may be reasons that you want to copy over your current installation...just letting you know you have options in case a fresh start might be preferred.

I have 2 hard drives in my laptop, and I just use one for extra storage. It's nice to have basically all of the data that I would frequently use in my computer and not deal with external drives, except for backups.
 
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Monbo Jumbo

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OK

I just screwed up my PC.

Reading the thread the other day about hard drive reliability had me thinking it's time to upgrade - so I bought an HGST internal 4 gb. I was happy to see this thread and I used the software above to clone the drive I was replacing.

Here's my setup.

SSD - with Windows and all programs.

Hard Drive (data)
new Hard Drive - (cloned above.)

What I didn't realize was the old hard drive was set to active, and contained the boot manager, not the SSD.

When I disconnected the old hard drive it wouldn't boot - so I connected it back - and then went into windows and set the SSD to active also. But I didn't move the boot manager.

duh

Now, when I go to boot - it looks on the active SSD, sees no boot manager and asks me for a disk. The machine is Win 10 - I have an Win 7 ultimate CD - but it just wants to reinstall windows - W

What do I do now?

thanks in advance.
 

gibdied

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Gdiguy

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I'm not sure this will work in your case (Win10 install with Win7 cd), but maybe as a start for searching - the windows CD has the ability to 'fix' the master boot record (i.e., to create it anew on a new hard drive when switching) - for win7 see something like http://www.thewindowsclub.com/repair-master-boot-record-mbr-windows

It looks like it's the same set of commands on Win 10, but you might have to create a win10 boot dvd/usb somehow - http://techgage.com/article/repairing-a-broken-bootloader-or-master-boot-record-in-windows-7-8-and-10/
 

Monbo Jumbo

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Thanks, I found a link to download a win 10 install/setup ISO/USB from Microsoft. I'm doing that step now.
 
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Monbo Jumbo

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I'm not sure this will work in your case (Win10 install with Win7 cd), but maybe as a start for searching - the windows CD has the ability to 'fix' the master boot record (i.e., to create it anew on a new hard drive when switching) - for win7 see something like http://www.thewindowsclub.com/repair-master-boot-record-mbr-windows

It looks like it's the same set of commands on Win 10, but you might have to create a win10 boot dvd/usb somehow - http://techgage.com/article/repairing-a-broken-bootloader-or-master-boot-record-in-windows-7-8-and-10/

Yup - I'm good now. That boot repair utility is inside the recovery section of Windows. The Win 10 install disc got me back into my machine to run that utility. So, I'm fixed - just need now to move that boot manager to complete the drive upgrade.

thanks sosh
 

Max Power

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Jul 20, 2005
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You can run into boot problems with a 4TB volume, especially if it's cloned from a smaller one. You need to set the system firmware to UEFI since BIOS can't boot off a drive over 2TB. And even if it's set to UEFI, the drive has to be initialized as a GPT disk rather than MBR.

Check out the Microsoft KB article here....

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2581408