Moving OS from one HDD to another

[nitefallz]

Here's the problem.

I have Windows 7 installed on an older IDE drive in my system. I put a SATA drive in there (which works fine, no driver issues) and did a drive copy through Norton Ghost with the hopes of getting rid of the IDE drive.

Drive copy is successful. I remove the IDE drive from the system, reboot into the Windows 7 recovery disc which detects there's an issue with the boot manager and fixes it. Reboot again, Windows loads starts up.

However, the keyboard does not work, though it is powered. The mouse works. I cannot login to my account because I can't enter my password. There's another account that has no password set, so when I click on the icon to login, it logs on, then off immediately. I tried to use the on-screen keyboard and received a message saying it couldn't be found.

Now, if I re-connect the IDE drive, and still boot from the SATA drive, everything works, I can get into Windows, but there's a few oddities.

The SATA drive is not the C: drive, the IDE is despite the disk manager telling me that the SATA drive is the active boot drive with the primary partition, etc bla bla. Looking through some different configs I notice that both drives are being referenced. The SATA drive is marked as having the main Windows install folder, but not as C:\.

I think the problem lies in the registry with how it views the hard drives being mounted. I think somewhere it sees a large part of the Windows config as resting on something like device 0 disk 0 part 1 which I would believe is the IDE drive, and the SATA drive is naturally something else, like device 2 disk 1 part 1.

Where in the registry should I go to fix this, if I even can? Part of me thinks I should just re-install from scratch at this point unfortunately. (Also I don't get why the keyboard is non functional)

thanks

 

[hardBBQ]

HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices is where drive signatures are stored. If you delete that key, it will be regenerated at next startup, and drive letters will be reassigned.

For problem-free cloning, I prefer to generalize the BCD and delete the MountedDevices key before making the image, as explained here.

Just FYI, here's a summary of the process (before creating the image) for an OS drive/partition containing the System and Boot files:

1. Generalize the BCD: (performed only once)

In an elevated command prompt window enter these four separate commands.

bcdedit /set {current} osdevice boot
bcdedit /set {current} device boot
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {memdiag} device boot

This makes bootmgr always target winload.exe on its own partition.

2. Delete the MountedDevices key and create the image. That's it!

If you want to preserve the drive letter assignments of the installation you're cloning, then export the MountedDevices key and restore it afterward.

In the cloned installation, check the System Restore settings and ensure that the appropriate drives are enabled. Also be aware that any drive letters enabled for the paging file will continue to be active, using the drives/partitions that are now assigned those letters.