Migrating Windows 7 on an ASUS N56VM Laptop to an SSD
That’s it! I can’t stand it any longer! My beautiful ASUS N56VM laptop – a mere year old, has slowed to the pace of an arthritic snail. Despite having 8GB of RAM and a 2.something GHz i7, it’s as wheezy as hell.
It’s time to move from spin disk to SSD, a 500GB Samsung 840 SD. Not least as I’d discovered that the existing disk was spinning at 5700rpm. I mean what is the point of selling a system with an i7 and 8GB of RAM and then equipping it with an ageing gerbil on a wheel to spin the disk. No wonder it had slowed to a heap of crap.
SO – how to copy the system from the existing spin disk to the SSD? Well first, I bought a disk big enough to take all my data. I can’t be doing with deleting stuff or moving onto external disk drives. Boring, boring, boring! I placed it temporarily into an external enclosure and used the free “EaseUS Partition Master” software to clone the disk from the internal spin disk to the external ssd.
There are two main advantages to cloning the existing spin disk. The first is that you don’t have to re-install all your software and setup all those little machine tweaks you like, second, if like this ASUS the windows installation software is all on a hidden recovery partition, it’s the only way to continue using the Windows 7 OEM licence that came with the machine.
So with the disk cloned – I took the ssd out of the external enclosure and swapped out the spin disk, turn on the machine and kapow lightening fast boot speeds, straight into windows – easy peasy.
Errr… No.
What I actually got was a boot failure and this error message screen:
– Status: 0xc0000225
– Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.
Hmmm…
A bit of investigation revealed that the original disk and the clone were both using GPT rather that the older MBR partition table of yesteryear. GPT is a newer type of partition table that uses 64bit addresses rather than 32bit allowing for greater disk capacities and other good things. It forms part of the UEFI standard and indeed the ASUS uses UEFI for basic system configuration rather than the older BIOS system. UEFI was expecting an ID relating to the old spin disk and instead was getting one relating to the new SSD. So it stalled.
Pressing ESC when the ASUS symbol appears at boot brings up the boot selector, but even selecting the ssd there doesn’t help. A Windows Repair Disk is needed to fix the startup process. Type “Repair” in the start menu search area, will bring up “Create a System Repair Disk”. Unfortunately doing this on an OEM Windows 7 (as installed on the ASUS) creates a less useful repair disk that only allows you to re-install the operating system. You need a proper repair disk as would be created by a vanilla Windows 7 installation. Hope you’ve got one of those to hand!
With a vanilla Windows 7 Repair Disk in the DVD drive, reboot the machine and let it boot the DVD. Once booted, it will ask you to select a language and will then display a list of all the Windows 7 installations it has detected. There may well be none in the list as happened with me. Click “Next” in any case and let it attempt to repair the system. This will end up with a reboot.
Let it boot the repair disk again. It will probably find your Windows 7 installation this time. You will probably have to do this cycle of repair and reboot a few times.
Eventually – you will need to help it fix the boot record. Select the command prompt from the repair menu:
– work out which drive letter your DVD drive is mounted to (select each drive in turn, type DIR, repeat etc…) – let’s say it’s G: then type the following:
G: cd boot bootrec /fixboot
This command can be used to recrete a Windows 7 boot loader too:
bootsect /nt60 SYS all
This fixes the boot record.
Then run the repair system again, just kind of… because.
At the very least you will now be able to boot your system from the ESC boot menu – if you’re lucky it may even boot without ESC key intervention at all!
Thanks to the following sites and References:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=696523&page=4
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32523/how-to-manually-repair-windows-7-boot-loader-problems/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/en-gb
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/252790-error-0xc0000225-windows-boot.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/20864-mbr-restore-windows-7-master-boot-record.html
I had the pleasure of doing this again this week. This time, my wife had just bought a beautiful ASUS N550J rocket ship with 16GB of RAM, a core i7 and … inexplicably … a 5200rpm 1TB spin disk. Why oh why do they do this? Great hardware with a total piece of crap in the middle for a disk. Well I know why – it reduces the price and makes the rest of the package look attractive.
Anyway – it’s a very nice machine, comes with Windows 8 which I suppose I shall tolerate. So I bought a Samsung SSD with the idea of cloning the hard drive onto it.
Since I last wrote – the same Samsung drive part number now come with cloning software which makes the job a bit easier. Except when I first plugged the drive in, on the end of a USB2.0 cable in an external enclosure – the Samsung software refused to write to it. I suspect this was due to the disk not being in some way initialised.
I tried to clone the disk using EaseUS Partition Master which made some attempts but produced a corrupted disk (probably more my fault than the software in fairness). But maybe that kicked something. A second attempt with the bundled Samsung software sorted the problem out and cloned the drive.
And wow – the machine goes very fast indeed! A joy to use, as it’s engineers always intended! Warp speed. Make it so. Earl Grey. Hot.