[RESOLVED] System Instability with Intel SSD after cloning on Win 7 64bit
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Join Date: Nov 2012Location: ColoradoPosts: 22
I backed up and cloned my working Win 7 64 to an Intel 120G SSD drive. The source was a Seagate 500G drive split into two 250G partitions. The first was the OS and it occupied 65G. The second was the programs which occupied 39G. True Image gave me the option to create new volumes that were proportionally distributed. After the cloning finished I removed the Seagate and set the Intel to the boot drive in the BIOS and then restarted and headed into Windows. It took absolutely forever to load and when it did all my screen icons were white and it was locked up and I was forced to power down. I then booted again and after an extrememy long boot it finally ended up in Windows but with half the icons as white. I then selected power down and it went out of Windows and hung and again I had to force a shut down. In comparision, if I clone to another of my Seagate HD's, the whole process from one stage to another goes smoothly, including the boot into Windows. It is only with the SSD to I have this problem. I am wondering if anyone could offer me any insight into this issue I am having with the SSD? Is it the fact that it is an SSD? Is it because there is a prohibition against downsizing in partion sizes? Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help and sharing of insights.
My System info if this helps:
CPU: AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0GHz
MB: ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z (CPU: AM3+ Chipset AMD 990FX/SB950)
Memory G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900)
Hard Drives: Seagate 7200 RPM 500 Barracuda plus 4 other data drives
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GT 640 2048MB GDDR3 Dual DVI, mHDMI Graphics Card 02G-P4-2643-KR
Issue resolved here.
Ronald,
Don't clone. Do a recovery of your backup from the recovery CD. Follow instructions here:
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/34509#comment-106890
Does Windows clean install on the same SSD perform well? Even improper alignment shouldn't affect performance to such extent.
Thanks Pat. I performed a back up of my current traditional drive (partitioned into C (OS) and D (programs)) to an internal drive H using Acronis 2013 Backup & Recovery. Those two drives are not SSD. I then booted into Acronis using the Acronis boot CD. I selected the bachup on drivec H. hoever, it did not give me the option to recover each partition separately. It did offer me the option to manually or automatically to proportionally resize the SSD so I chose the latter after playing around and being confronted with confusing choices of the former manual option. I saw no option to "restore the MBR+track0 and the disk signature" either before or after running the restore. After it was done I removed the older drive and put in its place the SSD and attempted to boot up. At first try it hung. The second took me into Windows. When I opened up Windows Explorer and Clicked on certain directories I got a message that it could not be found. Any suggestions? Is the link to the directions you supplied appear to be for prior version of True ImAge, does that matter?
Finally, what is the 1mb space in front of the first partition? My operating system will never it into it. Can you explain this for me?
Thanks again for your answer.
Thanks Pat. I performed a back up of my current traditional drive (partitioned into C (OS) and D (programs)) to an internal drive H using Acronis 2013 Backup & Recovery. Those two drives are not SSD. I then booted into Acronis using the Acronis boot CD. I selected the bachup on drivec H.
Can you post a screen shot of the windows disk management window? Right click on the computer icon on your desktop, choose manage, storage, disk management. In the view menu, choose top, list disks. Take note of where the active partition is.
The process should be:
- create a new disk and partition backup with all partitions (system reserved, C:\, D:\, recovery, diagnostics if any...). Store that backup on another disk
- remove the disk that contain C:\ and D:\ from the system
- put the SSD at the same spot as the older disk
- boot on the recovery CD, choose restore disk and partitions, navigate to your backup, restore each partition in the same order they were on the disk containing the C:\ partition.
- for each partition, ATI will ask you the new destination (select your SSD), then will show you the proposed layout (this is when you make sure you have 1MB before the first partition and each partition has a whole size in MB).
..., it did not give me the option to recover each partition separately. It did offer me the option to manually or automatically to proportionally resize the SSD so I chose the latter after playing around and being confronted with confusing choices of the former manual option.
That is weird. We'll see your disk type and layout. Maybe dynamic disk? or GPT disk?
After it was done I removed the older drive and put in its place the SSD and attempted to boot up.
This part I don't understand. Since you have completed the restore, the SSD should be in the system...
I have attached my updated Disk Management profile. I hope that it will provide you with useful info? It has changed from when I intially made this post. The SSD that was being discussed has been moved to a new role to support programs. I assigned as Drive E. By the end of this week I hope to have all programs moved to it. Then I plan to pick up another SSD and dedicate it to the OS. Unfortunately, that is on hold because I am waiting for a replacement motherboard to arrive. In the meantime, I am wondering if you could explain the disk layout you recommended? You stated that "for each partition, ATI will ask you the new destination (select your SSD), then will show you the proposed layout (this is when you make sure you have 1MB before the first partition and each partition has a whole size in M)". Can you explain the role of this 1 MB partition. If I look in my systems profile under disk management it does not, and to my knowledge, never shown this 1 MB space? I would appreciate your input on this?
Ronald,
Your layout is pretty straightforward, so you should not have any issue.
You could simply backup your D:\ partition and restore it on your SSD. You would do this operation from the recovery CD. The 1MB is not a partition, it is an offset: essentially unallocated space placed before the first partition on a SSD to align the disk. SSD alignment is essential to performance. A partition is aligned on an SSD when the offset expressed in bytes is divisible by 4096.
Backup your D partition
Boot on the recovery CD
Restore your D:\partition on the SSD. When you restore a single partition, the recovery CD will show you how it will be laid out on the SSD. This is when you create the 1MB space before.
Before you reboot, we need a bit of clean up. Boot the computer on the Windows installation CD. Get to a command prompt. Launch disk part
- LIST DISK
- SELECT DISK 0
- LIST PARTITION
- SELECT PARTITION 2 (the OLD D:\ Partition, make sure 2 is the right number)
- ASSIGN LETTER=X:
- SELECT DISK 2 (make sure that disk 2 is still your SSD for programs)
- SELECT PARTITION 1 (the new D:| Partition)
- ASSIGN LETTER=D:
- EXIT
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465%28WS.10%29.aspx
Pat, thank you very much for a very informtive response! Without knowlegeable users like your self we the less knowledgeable would be up the creek without a paddle. One last question regarding the offet, is it a precise number? For example, 1 MB is not evenly divisble by 4096. Should it really be something like 1007616 which is?
Ronald,
Confusingly the decimal representation of binary numbers have a number of ways of being represented. When a PC maker might say this has 1K of RAM, in actual fact it will have 1024 bytes not 1000, the 1MB will show up depending on how a program maker has decided to implement this to the end user, one of the reasons why a hard drive might be advertised as 200GB but in a disk utility will report a different figure.
If you use DiskPart to make a 1MB offset the correct Byte amount of 1024000 will be used and all the other amounts will be adjusted accordingly. It is possible that you might see it represented as 1023000 this is also correct as it is traditional to count zero as a physical number in computer programming.
Hi Pat. Ok, I admit it I am stuck again! I went through the Process you prescribed above. I first did a recovey using Acronis and that reported it was successful. Then, using the Windows Recovery CD I went into the Command Prompt and executed the commands (only exception was that I had to assign H to the 1TB drive even thought it was H in Windows. If I didn't do that when I got to Drive 2 it would not allow me to assign D). If you look at the screen shots of the Command Prompt screen shots and Windows Disk Management screen shot you can see I was back to where I started. Drive D that was assigned K to was back to D and E (SSD) that was assigned D to was back to E. I repeated this same process twice with the same results. What am I doing wrong?
p.s. Sorry about the file size of the _u4h8093.jpg. I had uninstalled my imaging tools before the conversion so I was not able to resize it.
I am trying to design a process by which Windows will be "tricked" into seeing your new disk as the D:\ Partition and just ignore the old partition.
I am not sure of what it really takes. The problem is that the programs folder is track in the registry, and it is possible that some registry settings link it back to the hardware ID.
We changed the drive letter, and it was not enough.
Can you try to change the drive letter and the partition label?
The command is, when the right disk and partition is selected,
FORMAT LABEL="Programs" for the new D:\ partition, change the label to blank for the old D partition.
Reboot. If Windows persists in reassigning D: to the old partition, I would then try a more radical approach:
using diskpart delete the old D partition completely. The command, when the right disk and partition is selected is:
DELETE PARTITION
At this point, either Windows is happy finding the new D:\ or I am running out of ideas.
I tried the removal of the drive labels and then went through the reassignment of drive letters. Then I did a List Volume command and it showed everything as planned. However, when I went into Windows and Drive Management ti was back again. So I took a risk and changed the drive letters while in it and ignored the warnings and then immediately did a reboot. That seemed to have worked. Only Microsoft Outlook was affected and I am now trying to repair that issue. Admittedely, I am stil a bit confused and hesitant as I move forward in the near future to make more changes and not knowing what to expect. Nonetheless, everyone who contributed insight regarding this posting has been a great help and much appreciated.
Ronald,
I think you are making it hard on your self by separating the programs folder from the partition where your system is. It is preferable to keep everything in the same partition since it is near impossible to restore the programs separately from the OS anyway (because of the registry). Next time you install Windows, I'd recommend you keep everything together. Only the content can be safely put in another partition.
I agree and i still have the two clones that will allow me to easily reset. If I was to reassign the SSD to both the OS and programs, each on a separate partition, how would you recommend approach both the backup and restore? Should I do a backup that includes both partitions and restore them as a single restore or perform individual back ups and restores for each partition sequentially? I am asking this because I sometimes find the restore choices in Acronis to be a little confusing. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
You would simply backup the 2 partitions in one single backup, remove the original disk, and restore to the new disk using the recovery CD. Normally, ATI is pretty good with creating the alignment automatically. Since restoring one partition after the other gives you (a) more control about verifying the alignment and (b) more options on the size of the new partitions without penalizing you from a time perspective, I'd go with a restore partition by partition (there is no need to reboot in between).
Success! I have now got both the OS and Programs on the SSD and it is up and running. Thanks for the recommendations. At first, I attempted to do the partitions separately and got all kinds of boot errors (e.g. missing bootmgr, freezing, etc.). Finally, I just did a restore to the drive from the backup as a whole (i.e. both partitions). After verifying everything it booted fine.
Good to hear Ronald!
If you are a performance maniac and if you have the courage, you could consider moving all this to a RAID0 SSD configuration on your new motherboard. Warning: moving to RAID will require the Plus Pack and the Universal Restore process, which is not easy to do.
One day, if you reinstall windows, consider keeping your programs on the C:\ partition