New SSD for Acer as1830t-Won't boot

[thephew]

So I got my new Acer as1830t and my new Crucial C300 64 GB SSD today. What I did:

1. I took out the OEM hard drive in the Acer and put it into my desktop with the new SSD.

2.Then I ran XXClone to clone the OEM HD image to the new SSD. I ran the "Make bootable" utility also to write the MBR, initialize the Boot Sector, and Write boot.ini.

3. I put the SSD into the Acer, but it won't boot it. Just says "NTLDR is missing". Well, it shouldn't be, because I did everything to properly initialize the boot sector.

Am I missing something simple here?

 

[TimeKeeper]

Try to burn the HD image / full system restore DVD via Win7’s maintenance utility instead of 3rd party software. ( W7 have better 64bit support )

 

[thephew]

Well, you're right, there was no way to boot the cloned drive. But clean installing worked, although it was annoying since I didn't have a Home Premium disc, restore or retail version (the Acer comes with NO media). I had to:

1. Download the ISO of W7 HP
2. Mount it using Daemon Tools Lite
3. Create a new partition on an external USB hard drive (since I didn't have a flash drive big enough), and make it active using the Disc Management tool (on another PC)
4. Copy the contents of the mounted ISO to the new partition
5. Boot from the USB hard drive on the ACER
6. Install W7
7. Activate windows the hard way (dictating/typing a ton of digits over the phone)
8. Go on Acer's website and install like a dozen drivers

A lot of work just to upgrade to an SSD! It's snappy fast though! My 1.2 GHz dual core lappy now feels more responsive than my 4.0 GHz quad core desktop due to the SSD.