Hi there,
a big hello to the community since this is going to be my very first post in the forums.
So here's the situation : i recently purchased an SSD drive for my desktop and obviously wanted to clone the system drive to it via my Norton Ghost 15 purchase that came bundled with it.
My configuration is as follows :
OS is Windows 7 64 bits
1 physical HDD, comprised of two partitions :
C, which holds my OS, and the SRP. (size is 100 Gbs, 30 Gb fre)
D, which holds my static data such as pictures, audio/video, games etc (size is 800 Gbs, 170 Gbs free)
Now, i plugged in the SSD, formatted it, made it up and running, a few copy tests and everything seemed to be fine, FW was up to date.
My goal, as most of you have probably guessed, is to clone the C drive into the SSD and boot on it, and do whatever i want with the legacy partitions that will result from the original drive (holding both C & D) being a de-facto slave drive. Ideally, i would like to later use some available space in the SSD to make an additionnal partition but that's another story.
Unfortunatly, i tried my luck without going through enough research, during my initial attempt to do things fast... the result is, in order to clone the C drive, i made a One Time Backup comprising both the C partiiton and the SRP that Norton detected as associated to it like it should, and then tried to restore them one after the other to the SSD drive, which by the way already had an assigned letter (which was F before i did anything).
So i went in the restore options, and went to "custom settings" and forced BOTH backups to be restored to my F drive... the 1st thing i noticed was that Windows automatically disabled/disconnected my F drive because of a "signature collision" right after the first restore (of the SRP). And again, without thinking, i forced it back online... i think even more people see me coming... after i rebooted the second time on that F Drive and restored the C parition on it, i had my immediate punishment : the "windows copy not genuine" error on my ORIGINAL disk... so i physically removed the SSD but unplugging it completely, and tried to boot as if nothing had happened from my usual HDD.
But again, i persistently got the "not genuine" error... deducing that i had probably managed to mess up HDD's MBR with all my faulty and uncontrolled operations, i ran windows repair ONCE and it bred a new "windows 7 (recovered)" to my OS listing on top of the initial Windows 7, which appeared to rely on my SSD for the MBR, but STILL used my HDD for everything else (i could clearly hear all the mecanical tics of it going on during the usual lenghty bootup sequence and when i used my system just like before, not exactly what you'd expect from an SSD, the hard drive activity window confirmed my point). Once bootup was complete and i could finally access my system again, i noticed my SSD was the locked drive on which windows was running (the windows symbol was on it, and i could not format it), a bit surprising since everything i did still physically relied on the HDD... and its letter had changed from F to E without my intervening.
After (finally) some Google, i managed to get my initial boot working from the HDD without relying on the recovered one again, by modifying the registry in safe mode in HKEY CURRENT LOCAL MACHINE\xxx\MountedDevices (and hence swapped the faulty E to C), rebooted and all went back fine, EXCEPT that now, the SSD is again the F drive, and can be accessed for formatting just like before.
Wierd issue : my SRP on C now appeared for all to see, not hidden anymore, assigned on E drive. I unassigned the letter for security purposes and formatted the SSD, rebooted and my machine worked like a charm again... so now, can anyone tell me if there is anything i should do BEFORE attempting anything again ? can my system and its associated MBRs and files be considered reliable again ? or are there any dark issues that may arise in the future i should check before going any further ?
Sorry for the long post, but i couldn't think of any other way of telling my sad story here...
Many thanks in advance for your time and consideration...
-André
