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I have a problem about transition from HDD to SSD.

I have a Sony Vaio laptop (a third gen Intel) which came with a HDD. For higher speeds I bought a new OCZ vector SSD to replace it and a HDD box to make a portable HDD from the old one.

Then I removed the HDD, installed the SSD, cloned the HDD to the SSD with Norton ghost and rebooted.

After the reboot, the system report failed to boot (missing winload.efi) and need recovery. Is there anything goes wrong? I have no idea. The contents on the HDD and the SSD look quite the same.

I need your suggestion, if I must clean install the system at least hope you can show me how to backup the licence...

Of course the best thing is change something in the boot to minimize the work.

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  • Recovering the license can be easy. Replace the HDD, boot from it and run a program to recover it. There are dozens of those and there are several posts on SU on how to do this.
    – Hennes
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 14:24
  • Did you clone the whole HDD or just the Windows partition? There will be a small (~100MB) partition that also needs to be cloned.
    – Shevek
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 14:27
  • Hi, thank :) Can I do it from the another system, since my HDD now become an portable one. I'm new with the UEFI things and it's very frustrated :(
    – Tiana987642
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 14:30
  • @Shevek I have a full disk clone, do I need to turn off secure boot and change to legacy boot? I'm new with these things :(
    – Tiana987642
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 14:34
  • @Hennes, thank for the the revision. I'm not a native English speaker
    – Tiana987642
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 14:48

1 Answer 1

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Well Norton Ghost in rather old and doesn't clone successfully all the data from newer operating systems such as Vista, 7, and 8.

I use Acronis True Image Home 2010 instead and does a far better job. Most likely the Windows clone will load successfully, or in worst case I can fix startup issues using the installation DVD once and that's it! So download Acronis or similar newer utility and you should have no problem. To make sure that there is 1:1 clone, select the option to manually clone the disk and then leave the partitions as is, without trying to resize them. You can later expand a small partition to fit all disk from Disk Management.

Another option that can also clone Linux and Mac partitions is Clonezilla. This creates a CD-ROM with which you boot the PC and start the cloning process, and if I remember correctly it is free to download.

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  • Thank, I will try your suggestion and feedback later. Is there anything I need to change in the BIOS? Secure boot?UEFI?
    – Tiana987642
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 14:49
  • Thank, it works :D As you said, Norton Ghost can't regconize two more hidden partitions. Acronis true image works like a charm.
    – Tiana987642
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 17:03
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    Will you be using paragraphs soon?
    – TFM
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 3:47

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