Installing an SSD, what am I missing?

Jon_01

Ok, I've done this before with my laptop and it took an hour, I've been at this for 2 days now!!

My wife has an Acer Aspire R7, I've made a recovery usb stick from the media that came with it.

I've installed the SSD, but when I try to use it to reinstall W 8.1, I either get an error saying 'the drives locked, please unlock it' I haven't locked it. Or it stops at 2% when repartitioning saying 'There an error' (10 out of 10 to MS for informative error messages).
When I check the SSD is has 400 meg recovery partition, a 300 meg EFI partition and 230 gig unallocated.

I've swapped the HD back, cloned the C: partition with EaseUS and switched back but the SSD then won't boot!

I've tested the SSD on another pc and it works fine, data can be moved to it and read back.

I've checked the bios and the SSD is showing up there and is recognized as the correct model and type.

What am I missing!!!!

Thanks.

pappa_golf

I did one for my son a few weeks ago , I had access to a h/drive caddy and simply used mini partition tools http://www.partitionwizard.com/ set to SSD drive


this is run from within windows and from memory reboots as it copies , I then simply removed his old drive , inserted the new one and was running within minutes

Jon_01

pappa_golf wrote: »

I did one for my son a few weeks ago , I had access to a h/drive caddy and simply used mini partition tools http://www.partitionwizard.com/ set to SSD drive


this is run from within windows and from memory reboots as it copies , I then simply removed his old drive , inserted the new one and was running within minutes

Thanks, I'll give that a try, but it looks similar to how EaseUS works, and that produced a boot drive that wouldn't boot!! (but at this point I'll try anything!).

pappa_golf

probably is the same , however it worked for me , I notice you mention EFI partition etc , has your machine got a uefi bios?


I might be tempted after struggling for a couple of days , of just doing a clean install from disk to the SSD , then caddy your old drive and copy data over .

Fightsback

What is the exact model of R7 and the make and model of SSD ?

For cloning I'd recommend Macrium Reflect Free:

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Toxteth_OGrady

Jon_01 wrote: »

I've swapped the HD back, cloned the C: partition with EaseUS and switched back but the SSD then won't boot!

Clone the whole disk:

See here

:cool:

TOG

paddyrg

I did this recently, to many tears, and finally got it working hence - install Acronis True Image on my laptop, use it to make a bootable USB drive of itself. Swap the hard drive for the SSD, put the HDD into a caddy or use a cable (I got one direct from Crucial, along with the Acronis key), boot from the USB key, then copy the HDD to the SSD. The other way round fails, the SSD must be inside the laptop or it won't be bootable. Doesn't need to be a bitwise clone, Acronis is cute enough to copy the stuff that matters and ignore the blanks.

Also note, the codes from Crucial for Acronis are for the 2014 version, windows 10 requires the 2015 version, there's a link on the Crucial support forum.

Jon_01

pappa_golf wrote: »

I did one for my son a few weeks ago , I had access to a h/drive caddy and simply used mini partition tools http://www.partitionwizard.com/ set to SSD drive


this is run from within windows and from memory reboots as it copies , I then simply removed his old drive , inserted the new one and was running within minutes

Thanks, that worked a treat. No idea what it dose over and above EaseUS (which I've use before and has always worked?). The SSD booted first time after the cloning and everythings working as it should (but much faster ).

pappa_golf

glad to have assisted