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I'm having trouble replacing my hard drive
System Info:
- Sony VAIO VPCF115fm
- i7 Q720 Quad Core CPU (1.6 GHz) Turbo boost up to 2.8 GHz
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M GPU with 1 GB VRAM
- 500 GB spinning media hard drive (Seagate ST9500325AS)
- 6 GB DDR3 1333 MHz RAM
- Motherboard: M930 main board 1P-009BJ00-8012 REV 1.2 MBX-215
Old Drive: Seagate ST9500325AS (500GB spinning media)
New Drive: Samsung 840 EVO (500 GB SSD)
1st Attempt
- Using MiniTool, copy Recovery partition from Old Drive to New Drive
- Using MiniTool, copy System Reserved partition from Old Drive to New Drive
- Left the rest of the space on New Drive as Unallocated; Unallocated space is identical in size to C partition on Old Drive
- Shut off machine, and replaced Old Drive with New Drive (i.e. Old Drive no longer connected to machine in any way)
- Started in System Recovery Mode
- Tried to recover C Drive; didn’t work because C Drive doesn’t exist on new drive
- Did a full system recovery from recovery partition on New Drive
- After recovery, machine auto-reboots, on auto reboot, the machine is stuck at the black screen with the blinking white cursor. It looks like it can’t find the new main partition
- Continued in “After attempts 1-3 . . .” section below
2nd Attempt
- Using MiniTool, copy Recovery partition from Old Drive to New Drive
- Using MiniTool, copy System Reserved partition from Old Drive to New Drive
- Made the rest of the drive into an empty partition named B. B is identical in size to C partition on Old Drive.
- Shut off machine, and replaced Old Drive with New Drive (i.e. Old Drive no longer connected to machine in any way)
- Started in System Recovery Mode
- Tried to recover C Drive; didn’t work because C Drive doesn’t exist on new drive
- Did a full system recovery from recovery partition on New Drive
- After recovery, machine auto-reboots, on auto reboot, the machine is stuck at the black screen with the blinking white cursor. It looks like it can’t find the new main partition
- Continued in “After attempts 1-3 . . .” section below
3rd Attempt
- Using MiniTool, copy Recovery partition from Old Drive to New Drive
- Using MiniTool, copy System Reserved partition from Old Drive to New Drive
- Left the rest of the space on New Drive as Unallocated; Unallocated space is identical in size to C partition on Old Drive
- Shut off machine, and replaced Old Drive with New Drive (i.e. Old Drive no longer connected to machine in any way)
- Did a full system recovery from Recovery Disks
- After recovery, machine auto-reboots, on auto reboot, the machine is stuck at the black screen with the blinking white cursor. It looks like it can’t find the new main partition
- Continued in “After attempts 1-3 . . .” section below
After attempts 1-3 the following happens:
- I put the Old Drive back in to computer, and rebooted just fine.
- I connected the New drive via a USB adaptor
- On the Start Menu, right-clicked on Computer, then clicked Manage to get me to computer management
- In Disk Management, I see the Recovery and System Reserved partitions look Ok a. Difference in System Reserved partition label: i. Old Drive: Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) ii. New Drive: Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)
- The main partition on the New Drive is labled “G” for the 1st and 3rd attempts; “B” for the 2nd attempt
- It looks like all the files from the recovery are in G as they should be
- Besides the drive letter, the difference in main partition label on each drive is: a. Old Drive: Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) b. New Drive: Healthy (Primary Partition)
4th Attempt
- Using MiniTool, copy Recovery partition from Old Drive to New Drive
- Using MiniTool, copy System Reserved partition from Old Drive to New Drive
- Using MiniTool, copy C partition from Old Drive to New Drive
- The machine reboots to complete the C partition copy onto New Drive
- Under Disk Management, I see the copy of the C partition on the New Drive is labeled “G”
- Besides the drive letter, the difference in main partition label on each drive is: a. Old Drive: Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) b. New Drive: Healthy (Primary Partition)
- All filed copied correctly from C onto G
- In Disk Management, I see the Recovery and System Reserved partitions look Ok a. Difference in System Reserved partition label: i. Old Drive: Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) ii. New Drive: Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)
- Shut off machine, and replaced Old Drive with New Drive (i.e. Old Drive no longer connected to machine in any way)
- On boot up, the machine is stuck at the black screen with the blinking white cursor. It looks like it can’t find the new main partition.
What am I missing? Does the main partition on New Drive need to be named C? Do I need to change something in BIOS?
Update 11/17/2014
Thanks for your answers. In the end, I did what user tbenz9 advised. After creating an image of my old HDD on my new SSD, I installed my new SSD and it booted fine. This only copied the C partition and the system reserved partition, but not the recovery partition. I then did a system recovery using the recovery DVDs. This gave me a fresh install and created the recovery partition.
Follow up questions:
- What was different about using the Samsung data migration tool that allowed a successfully boot on the new SSD, where as copying each partition using MiniTool I could not boot? Does using MiniTool somehow not create a new MBR, but the Samsung software does?
- My recovery partition is the original recovery partition from almost 5 years ago. After recovering, it took almost a day to do all the necessary updates for Windows 7, Google Chrome; and I removed junkware that came with the machine such as a Bestbuy installer (I bough the machine from them) and unnecessary VAIO software. I have my machine currently configured in the way I would want it after a recovery in the future; so, how do I create a new recovery partition using the current state of my system?
- The only currently installed item I wouldn't want on my new recovery partition is Kaspersky Internet Security. Do I need to uninstall it before creating the new recovery partition?
- Once I have created the new recovery partition, how do I delete my old recovery partition?
Thanks for your help. I've added a update with some additional questions above. – Hans – 2014-11-18T22:00:04.520