macq wrote:
Thanks John. It's easy to find once someone tells you where it is 🙂
That ISO boots through UEFI so proves nothing wrong with the hardware. It seems very odd that Win7 can't create a Repair disc that can boot but that seems to be the case.
I've spent the whole day figuring out how to shrink my system partition down to fit the SSD and removing the recovery partition at the end of the drive - just in case that was causing trouble (I have the restore DVDs anyway). In the end my system partition is only about 60GB total (30 free/30 used). It makes no sense to me why an image of that won't restore to a virgin Intel 520 120GB. It really shouldn't be this hard. Argh.
The Win 7 recovery of a system image ONLY works recovering to a "same size" or bigger replacement disk ... not onto a smaller disk ... regardless of how much ( or little ) actual used space there is on the disk being recovered. Always been like that ... but not a problem for recovery once you get your SSD setup.
You do not need to shrink down your recovery partition or system partition or anything! Just pull out the old drive ... put in the SSD ... and use the asus recovery disks.
They will take care of downsizing all the partitions semi appropriately and will put EVERYTHING back onto the recovered SSD including the recovery partition.
You can use something like MiniTool Partition Wizard after the complete recovery onto the SSD has finished to make final after the fact resizing adjustments.
Let the recovery work ... it takes a whole bunch of reboots to accomplish all the stuff and several times it kinda looks like it is done ... before it actually is ( and still needs subsequent reboots ). Let it grind it out and have your system sit there for 30 minutes without any thing happening at all before even trying to use it again. The recovery process a couple of times puts out a semi misleading message making you think it is doing a final reboot.