Trouble installing new hard drive

X

XrBob

New Member
I recently got a new laptop, ASUS b34e. It came with a 500 gb hard drive, and I wanted to replace it with a solid state drive and use the original drive as an external. I got an enclosure for the original drive and the sales guy recommended norton ghost to do the transfer, so I got that as well.

I transferred my original installation to the SSD using ghost. I put the new hard drive in and booted up. The problem I'm having is when I boot, it says preparing desktop for a long time, probably a minute. Then I get a blank blue background with no task bar or start menu. I remember a trick, so I open up the task manager and say new process, "explorer.exe". That gives me a task bar and icons, but I get popup saying this is a temporary user and changes will be deleted after I leave. I can't open up my computer, it says "no such interface supported".

My guess is the computer got upset to have a non-factory installed hard drive. I can see in the corner it says that windows 7 is not genuine, so maybe if it has a non-factory part, it deactivates.

A separate issue is the old drive in the external enclosure. I can't seem to get any computer to detect it. The light goes on and I can feel the drive spinning, but I can't mount it. I read something about switching it from master to slave, is that related?
 
For best results, you should always do a fresh install of Windows onto an SSD.
 
He probably has Windows on a backup partition of the old drive. (OEM). So doing a fresh install, is probably out of question. I would not have used Norton Ghost. That may be the problem. I would have downloaded the old drive's diagnostic program from the maker of the drive off the internet and make a image of your old drive, or clone it. Is the old drive IDE or sata? If sata, you won't able to switch between master and slave. Should not have a problem. Is it USB for power or ac plug in. If USB for power, some needs to have 2 usb's plugged in to read the data. I have a external sata 2 250gb drive and if I plug into a laptop with it I have to use the other usb to read it. Look into BIOS and see if you can 3rd boot from usb devise.
I would say Norton Ghost is the problem with the key code for windows 7, when you get it up and running you should be able to activate with the key code from the back of your laptop.
 
Well, I formatted the original install and put a fresh copy of windows 7 on the solid state. It took a while to get through all the updates and drivers, but I think it's going to work out. The only hitch is the switchable graphics option. The option is there, but doesn't work very well. Any reason not to always stay on the discrete graphics? I figure the only downside is shorter battery life, but as long as I get 3 hours out of it I think I'll be ok.

I think found the problem for the external enclosure. The cable has a usb 3.0 and a usb 2.0 option. I thought the idea was I would just choose which one I needed. Turns out I need to plug both of them in and use up two usb ports for it to work, major bummer. But, after installing the usb 3.0 drivers on my laptop, it seems to work just fine when only plugging into the one usb 3 port. I'd still prefer an enclosure that's more reliable and would only ever need one port, but oh well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top