HOW TO: clone HDD to SSD with Symantec Ghost

here are the steps i used to clone my HDD to the new SSD using Symantec Ghost 11.5. i used the two USB ports on my laptop to connect the old HDD in a USB enclosure and to connect a USB stick which contained Symantec Ghost. of course, i could put Ghost on the HDD to begin with (in which case only one USB port would have been needed), but i didn't want to take any chances.

1. instal the SSD in the laptop and put the HDD in a USB enclosure.
   
   
2. plug the USB enclosure into the first USB 2.0 port.
   
   
3. put Symantec Ghost (that is Ghost32.exe) on a USB stick and plug it into the second USB 2.0 port.
   
   
4. put a Windows Vista installation DVD in the optical drive and boot the laptop with it. you need Vista disc and not 7 disc, since Microsoft has stripped the Windows 7 installation DVD from its pre-boot environment, so you cannot run external programs.
   
   
5. at the Vista install screen, select "Repair your computer"
   
   
   
6. it will detect the HDD attached to the USB port with Windows 7 installation on it and offers to repair it (similar to the image below). do not repair anything, but deselect the currently selected drive and click on "Next".
   
   
   
7. when the System Recovery Options opens, click on "Command Prompt"
   
   
   
8. you can run DiskPart to confirm that the SSD is now recognized as Disk 0 and the HDD is Disk 1. type DiskPart.exe at the command prompt, and when if loads, type LIST DISK. to exit to the command prompt, just type EXIT.
   
   
9. now change to the Ghost USB drive. in my case it was F:, since C: (Recovery partition) and D: (System Reserved partition) and E: (main partition with the OS and data) were the three partitions on the HDD connected to the first USB port. and F: is the only partition on the USB stick connected to the second USB port.
   
   
10. run Ghost in clone mode by typing the following at the command prompt and press enter
    
    this command tells Ghost to clone from the source (Disk 2) to destination (Disk 1) and image the entire boot track (-ib switch) while making all the destination partitions the same size as their respective source ones except the last one which should occupy the rest of the disk (szeL option). NOTE: Ghost counts disks starting from 1 whereas DiskPart counts them starting from 0. so DiskPart disk 0 is mapped to Ghost disk 1 and DiskPart disk 1 is mapped to Ghost disk 2.
    
    
11. Ghost loads its GUI and asks you to confirm that the partition sizes are correct. they should be, but just double check to be sure. (this requires that you know your old HDD partitions sizes beforehand and their empty spaces, so do your homework before).
    
    
12. once you confirm that, you can go ahead with the cloning. it will ask for your permission again to start the job.

it took about 1hr:30min for me to finish migrating about 90GB of data. i then shut down the computer, unplugged the USB enclosure and the USB stick, took out the installation DVD from the optical drive, and restarted the computer to boot from SSD. before the log-in screen showed up, i was told that Windows 7 is updating something and that i should not turn the computer off. after logging into Windows, it decided that it had found a new hardware (presumably the new SSD?) and required another reboot. after the reboot and the subsequent log-in, i checked to see if TRIM is enabled by running the following in an administrator Command Prompt

which means that TRIM is enabled. running AS SSD benchmarking software also showed that the partition alignment is correct on the SSD. i then went ahead with the usual tweaks (see this post for a list).