Windows Not Booting After SSD Install

Hi guys. One of my SSDs on my Vaio Z1 recently failed, so I bought a new one (I went from a 128x2 and 64x1 configuration to a 128x2 and 128x2 configuration). I made an image of my entire system a while ago, so I had that to fall back on. Today, I swapped out the broken 64 GB SSD for a new 128 GB SSD. I then deleted the RAID and rebuilt it, and, using Hiren's Boot CD, formatted the C: drive in Disk Management. After loading my old image back on to the drive, however, Windows will not boot - I get an "Operating system not found" message. Is this because one of my SSDs is different now? Or did I do something wrong with formatting them after installing the new one? I really have no idea what I'm doing, so I probably am missing something pretty obvious. All of my files and everything show up in Hiren's Boot CD, I just can't get into Windows, or even see the Win 7 logo at bootup. It just goes the Vaio logo, then the SSD configuration, then displays the error message. I also made an image of my recovery partition and something called "System Reserved," but I didn't put those back on the SSDs after I installed the new one, so could that be causing any sort of problem since my original image of my system had those partitions on them and it's expecting them to be there? Again, I have no idea what I'm doing, so I'm just throwing everything out there.

 

Fixed it! Only took 6 hours to figure out how, though. I created a System Repair Disc through my mom's Windows 7 computer, loaded it into my laptop, and repaired the master boot record (you click the Command Prompt option when after the CD loads, then type "bootrec /fixmbr"). If anyone can explain what I did wrong originally and why doing the above fixed it, I'd greatly appreciate it!

 

Yep. Reinstall. When you change drives (unless it's the exact same model drive... actually i'm not sure), you should reinstall windows. Sorry.

edit: hmm interesting that you didn't have to reinstall windows... ignore my post. You posted just as I did

 

It feels like repairing laptops is like brain surgery, lol.

Question: When I reformatted the SSD, I made one large partition using all available space. Is that what I was supposed to do? I was reading somewhere in that 6 hours of research that when doing a RAID 0 configuration, you have to leave some extra space for TRIM or something? Anyone know anything about this?

 

You probably made a backup of your data/system PARTITION and not of the whole drive. The former does NOT include the MBR (Master Boot Record) so when the BIOS tries to hand over to the SSD, it does not find an entry about from which partition it should start from (even if there is only one partition). Fixmbr writes a correct MBR and helps in this situation. If you do a backup with acronis, select the whole drive (this includes the seperate MBR item); if you use Ghost, select Disk-to-Image instead of Partition-to-Image mode.

Yes that is ok. Why waste expensive SSD space by not fully utilizing disk space by data partitions? If you occupy 50% of your drive only, you will wear out the drives faster because these cells get written to much more often. What you are probably speaking about is that you should leave some 10% or so space on your partition unused in order to get optimal write speeds. Since RAIDed SSDs do not have TRIM support yet, don't worry.

Have fun with the new array - love to see your benchmarks!