Okay, I'm extremely frustrated and it's 3:30am and I'm giving up.

I purchased an SSD to replace the system drive in my desktop. I cheaped out and picked up a drive that was smaller than my existing system drive. Not much smaller, as my main drive was a 300GB WD Raptor, and the SSD is 240GB.

So first I shrank the main partition of my system drive. I now have a ~175GB partition and whatever that tiny 100MB partition that Windows 7 creates when it installs.

I've tried a couple methods now to no avail. First, I tried using Clonezilla, but I just couldn't get the SSD to boot properly. The furthest I got was to see the Windows 7 boot animation, but then it would say something about Autochk failing because it couldn't be found and I couldn't get any further. No amount of startup repair, bootrec commands, etc could get it to go fully into Windows.

Then I tried the basic buit-in Windows Backup and Recovery method. I created a system image onto a secondary drive, and booted to a recovery disc. But now every time I try to restore the image, I get an error that the restore failed because the "volume shadow copy service component encountered an unexpected error." It doesn't really say anything at all.

So how do I go about doing this? I'd really rather not start from scratch, even though I know it would be a better experience. It just have so freaking much set up in this OS...