Hard drive clone failed. I don't know why.

[watts300]

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.

 

[mbreslin1954]

I don't see any pictures in your post, not sure why.

Didn't Norton drop Ghost a while ago? I haven't used Ghost since before Norton bought it years ago, but if it's been discontinued a while, I'm not surprised it didn't do too well on Windows 8. Does it even support Windows 8?

I've always used Acronis True Image, and I've noticed, when cloning Windows 8 drives (I didn't actually use their cloning feature, I made a system image backup then did a restore), it missed one partition. I got it to work, but I think lost the built-in recovery partition. But since I kept the original laptop hard drive in a drawer, I have it if I ever need it.

So, sorry I can't help directly (but the missing image would have helped), I just wanted to say that even with competing products (Acronis True Image) I've had issues with Windows 8 boot disks.

 

[watts300]

I don't see any pictures in your post, not sure why.

Didn't Norton drop Ghost a while ago? I haven't used Ghost since before Norton bought it years ago, but if it's been discontinued a while, I'm not surprised it didn't do too well on Windows 8. Does it even support Windows 8?

I've always used Acronis True Image, and I've noticed, when cloning Windows 8 drives (I didn't actually use their cloning feature, I made a system image backup then did a restore), it missed one partition. I got it to work, but I think lost the built-in recovery partition. But since I kept the original laptop hard drive in a drawer, I have it if I ever need it.

So, sorry I can't help directly (but the missing image would have helped), I just wanted to say that even with competing products (Acronis True Image) I've had issues with Windows 8 boot disks.

It's odd that you can't see the pictures; I can. Here's direct links that photo bucket makes.

I'll look into Acronis. Newest version I assume?
For what it's worth, if anything, the computer I was using to clone the two drives has Windows 7.

Eh... try this for pictures. This is bound to work.
https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A8GtnIORG5p5CU

 

[watts300]

....................

 

[watts300]

""""
I've always used Acronis True Image, and I've noticed, when cloning Windows 8 drives (I didn't actually use their cloning feature, I made a system image backup then did a restore), it missed one partition.
""""


I was thinking more about what you wrote above. I think a possible solution (maybe some one could confirm) for me is to do what you had alluded to --
*Use the USB flash drive (delivered tomorrow) to make Windows recovery media. HP/MS are doing what Apple does now and not supplying optical media. Which I'm actually 100% okay with.
*Make a True Image backup.
*Reinstall the SSD, and reinstall Windows 8 with the recovery media.
*Restore from the backup.
*Hopefully get on with my life.

In terms of path-of-least-resistance, this might be best. However, it seems like the time-intensive path, too. But then again, trying to figure out the cloning nonsense could end up taking a long time too.

I don't mean to kill the thread. I'm definitely still open for more thoughts from others. I can't do the steps above anyway because I don't have the flash drive yet.

 

[mbreslin1954]

Yes, that's what I would do. I think that's why I did that in the first place. You only need one extra drive, in my case an external hard drive, to make the backup image to, then that same drive to restore the image from (after swapping drives in the PC and booting from the True Image boot disk). If you actually clone the drives, then, in the case of a laptop, you have to connect both the original and the new drive to a second computer in order to do the clone. It takes more time to make the backup and then restore it to a new drive, but it's easier, and you can always to other things while it is backing up and restoring. Plus it leaves me with a backup image of my new system, which I save for many years.

In my case, the laptop I did this to (swapped out the original 750 GB HDD for a 256 GB SSD), I did the backup and restore with my Archive external HDD, the one that I keep all my backup images on. Well, about a year later the system became unbootable for some reason, so I just restored from that backup image I originally made to do the clone with. Of course then I had to apply about 137 Windows 7 patches, but that's another story.