SSD / Windows 7 - Setup help

[Hereward]

Hello.

Re: New SSD issue with 2011 Dell Inspiron N7110 laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium.

My 15 year old son has developed an interest in computing so I have been letting him play with my laptop. So far he has upgraded the RAM from 4 to 8GB and also recently replaced the CPU from the original Intel i3 to an Intel i7. We are waiting on a 135w power supply cable to replace the current 90w power supply but all seems to be working fine.

His current issue is an attempt to replace the original 2011 Western Digital Scorpio Blue hard disk with a new Western Digital Blue "3D NAND SATA" SSD.

He plugged the new SSD in to a USB port and then used "Easeus" to copy the hard disk data across from the laptop.

He then removed the original hard drive and installed the new SSD but we are getting an error message and cannot use the laptop unless we reinstall the original hard drive.

Error message:
"Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause"
It then suggested running Startup Repair which we did do no avail. The laptop won't boot.

I imagine there is a really obvious step we are missing to get the laptop/Microsoft products to talk to the new SSD but I am clueless and my son only knows what he watches on Youtube.

Any advice appreciated, thank you.

[S6PNJ]

It might be a UEFI / MBR issue - but more than that, I can't really add.

https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Some_basi...

[xeny]

Hereward said:

Hello.


Any advice appreciated, thank you.

If it's a legit 7 licence, download 10 Home onto a USB stick, and reinstall fresh on the SSD with that.

[speedyman]

Windows 7 is old, the drivers probably don't support the new device. Have you tried booting in safe mode ? I would try upgrading to W10 first on the hard drive. Then start the process again.

[technobob]

Did he actually clone the ssd, or just copy everything over?

If not Easus should clone the ssd exactly as the original, so should boot.

Hope this helps

[Hereward]

Thank you for the replies and the reading matter.

It's genuine pre-installed Windows 7. I am reluctant to move to Windows 10 since the laptop runs vehicle diagnostics software that I think requires W7 to work.

He said he cloned the hard disk.

If this gets sorted I will update the thread.

[Monty Python]

I had this issue with trying to clone a Toshiba laptop. From what I could gather there's a hidden recovery partition on the hard drive that the cloning software doesn't appear to be able to copy over, and because it wasn't transferred to the SSD it wouldn't boot. The only way I could get it to work was by doing a clean install.

[TonyRPH]

Hereward said:

Thank you for the replies and the reading matter.

He said he cloned the hard disk.

If you still have the old disk, boot from it (in the original machine) and then go to control panel and create a 'system repair disc' from the 'Backup and restore' category.

You must backup to a USB stick.

Then boot from a USB installation disk*, and select the repair option (if you don't get this from your existing SSD installation) and then choose the restore from backup option.

This should get you going again.

• If booting from SSD gives you the option to repair use that instead.

[Mr Pointy]

Monty Python said:

I had this issue with trying to clone a Toshiba laptop. From what I could gather there's a hidden recovery partition on the hard drive that the cloning software doesn't appear to be able to copy over, and because it wasn't transferred to the SSD it wouldn't boot. The only way I could get it to work was by doing a clean install.

I found that Macrium was the only software (of those that I tried) that would clone all partitions on a drive.