Trying to restore/move a Windows7 installation partition after getting an SSD

aekkusu

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Aug 21, 2014
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So previously I had an older PC on which I had two SATA drives and an IDE one and on the latter I had Windows 7 installed (I kept it on that drive since I'm not using Windows 7 that often, I'm primarily using Debian as my daily go-to OS), but since then I got a new PC which has no connectivity for IDE, so I had to decommision the drive, and before I did that, I backed up the Windows 7 partition (and the second partition which I used mostly for storing sofware and stuff that I wouldn't want to get wiped after a fresh Windows install) using dd.
Not reading up on this on the internet, doing so with the intention to restore the partition image on the same spot on the disk, but since the SSD is larger than the IDE drive, I made the partitions on it bigger, so there's no chance the Windows 7 partition to be on the same spot on the disk. I tried booting into Windows 7 from GRUB after it successfully detected the Win7 install on the second partition on the SSD, but it just leaves me with a blank screen with a blinking white cursor, so I'm guessing it's not going to fly again. So my question to you: is it possible to ressurect the Windows 7 installation, avoiding having to reinstall Windows? (which would severly complicate things, having to backup and wipe the Debian install I have on the first partition...)

So far I've tried this to fix the Windows 7 install by pointing at the right disk "coordinates": https://superuser.com/questions/349255/clone-windows-partition-from-linux/349277#349277 (fixntfs.c), but I can't seem to get it to work, all I get is some error in regards to not being able to detect the disk's geometry (I think it was the number heads I couldn't figure out to input in the command line), so I couldn't fix it.

Any other suggestions?
 
Solution
Since that Windows 7 installation (and the backup you made of it) belongs to a different system, you can't use it on your new PC.
You have to install Windows from scratch on your new PC.