How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Evening

Open your brand new SSD (Samsung 830 series 128GB)

Marvel with excitement at the iPhone-like packaging and eagerly image your old drive (Intel 80GB G1 SSD) onto the new one with Clonezilla - 15 mins and booted into Windows 7 on the new SSD. This is where I should have stopped - oh what a fool I was to continue.

Side-track to find out why PC basically hangs for 1-2 mins after login and discover it is Microsoft Security Essentials misbehaving - story for another day - 20 mins ...

Everything has gone smoothly so far - run AS SSD and ogle the new benchmark numbers. Uh oh. offset 31K bad? Great. I recall that I never fixed this on my Intel SSD and that is why, so I foolishly decide to try and fix it. I find an answer at lifehacker.

Download GParted and install on my trusty multiboot USB drive - I actually already had a GParted livecd on there but decided to throw Parted Magic on there to see what that was like.

Create a Windows 7 Repair Disc (directly from my copy of Windows 7 Home Premium I'm running at home). Wait, no, side-track and test out lightscribe to make a fun label for it first.

Discover that lightscribe software service needs to update. Do that. Find a label maker software - oh, already had one in some software suite - great. Hmm, it won't let me select my CDRW as my lightscribe driver...it will apparently only accept the lowest lettered optical disc drive. Wow. That's good engineering (Cyberlink LabelPrint). Re-map drive names so DVDRW drive comes first. Burn lightscribe label - remember why I haven't burned a lightscribe label in 6 years - because it takes way too long. Finally, let Windows create/burn a windows 7 repair disc.

Boot into Parted Magic and shift my partition forward a few MB, wait 15 mins, then shift back 1 MB, per Lifehacker instructions. Success - now, Windows will no longer boot because it's confused. (This is expected)

Boot up my freshly burned Windows 7 repair disc. I'm greeted with the following:

[![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E9f9xYokuds/TyIPYSZKrwI/AAAAAAAAAN8/MGe7Fl6c3M4/s320/win7_recovery_error-crop.png)](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E9f9xYokuds/TyIPYSZKrwI/AAAAAAAAAN8/MGe7Fl6c3M4/s1600/win7_recovery_error-crop.png)

The windows recovery disc I burned from the copy of windows I am trying to repairing is incompatible with itself. Yes, that's right - incompatible with itself.

Do some quick searches and come up short. Decide screw it - I'll just reinstall Windows 7 on my SSD. Insert my Windows 7 Upgrade DVD (Family Pack - likely the source of all my pain!) Format the drive, select it - realize that Windows 7 RTM does not create "100MB" partition which has possible side-effect of aligning partition properly (same issue w/ original SSD install I think...). Decide to try and manually create partitions back in GParted and then let Windows 7 try to install.

Nope - Windows 7 will not install on it. Error 80300024. Excellent. No real useful info found.

Remove fancy new SSD and put back in old Intel one. Admit defeat for now.

4 hours after I started - blog about it, back at square one.