SSD boot issues

[sac]

This was/is posted to "CPU & Components." Realized I should have posted it here.

Hello, A Crucial 256G SSD (M225) was cloned using Acronis Home 2010. Cloning was reported as successful, but the drive "hangs" at boot of Win 7 ("Starting Windows" appears; nothing else). I tried using HDClone software - same result. Even tried cloning to a laptop (HP) and, here, the drive stays in "Starting Windows" for 5 minutes, then goes to login screen, where it stays for an additional 5 minutes; finally going to the application screen. Once there, it seems to work normally, but a re-boot causes the same delays. The drive won't ever launch the operating system on the desktop. Could this be a partition alignment problem? The desktop is a Dell Dimension 9200 (XPS-410). Dell tech support says the machine won't support an SSD drive, but I have a hard time believing that; I think that's just an easy out for them. Is there any cloning software that will properly align the partitions of an SSD drive? This has been a very frustrating ordeal and I'm ready to give up and go to a WD 600G VelociRaptor drive. Thanks, SC

 

[sub mesa]

Why don't you install fresh to your SSD, that is recommended anyway.

Now you're probably running unaligned. But that still shouldn't mean 5 minutes wait time. Is the controller set to AHCI?

 

[sminlal]

I can't speak for the tools you're using, but I was able to clone a working system from a hard drive to an SSD using the "System Image" backup tool that's built into Win 7.

I used the backup utility to create a backup of my boot partition onto an external USB drive, then told it to create a "Recovery DVD". With those two items in hand I then removed the old HDD, installed the new SSD, booted from the recovery DVD, and used it to restore the backup to the SSD.

This worked just fine. But I did it primarily as a test, since then I've reinstalled Win7 onto the SSD from scratch to ensure that the partitions are properly aligned and all of Win7's SSD features are enabled.