Need help installing SSD in laptop

[cadder]

It seems that the SSD install broke my laptop. I bought a Samsung SSD to install in my Dell Latitude E6500. The SSD came with Norton Ghost so I decided to use that. I installed Ghost, connected the SSD and let Ghost copy it, including copying the MBR and making the SSD bootable. This took almost 2 hours. Then I installed the SSD in the laptop and waited to be wowed. Windows started to boot then stopped just before displaying the desktop with a message "preparing your desktop". After several minutes I got some error messages that various DLL's were missing. I tried rebooting a few other times with the same result. So I put the original hard drive back in and got the same error message. After a few reboots I got to a desktop with black background, and about half of my icons showing. Very frustrating. At first I thought I would install the original hard drive and use a different cloning program, but now it seems that Norton somehow damaged my OS and I don't know how to fix the original install now.

 

[Ubrales]

Hard disk to SSD cloning will not work because of the SSD specific drivers that need to be installed. This includes TRIM.

At this point, you need to do a complete re-installation of the OS and other programs on to your new SSD.

 

[cadder]

I had issues with the cloning but after figuring out the tricks to operating Ghost I got it to work the second time. The big thing with SSD installation is switching to AHCI mode. My Dell installation of Vista included the appropriate AHCI drivers so I just switch to AHCI mode in the BIOS and it boots up fine.

The other issue is TRIM. I'm not sure if TRIM works under Vista or not but it is easy to enable with Win7. My plan is to ultimately upgrade to Win7 so I won't worry about TRIM until then.

In my particular installation I don't write and erase files all that much, the SSD is intended to speed up reads more than anything.

 

[Ubrales]

Great! And if you using the SSD primarily for reads, it will last a very long time! Forever and a day!