That sounds easy, John, but don't assume I'll be insulted if you give me pretty elementary instructions!

When I have the clone in the bay it is only identified by the name I gave it (clone of C). Are you saying boot up normally (the SSD being drive C) and then copy the clone to the SSD which caries the OS? That sounds a bit worrisome.

I'm not sure how you go about using a ghosted copy, and maybe somebody else might be able to help you here. I use, and recommend Acronis True Image Home 2012 and do a complete image back up of my SSD (C Drive) on to an external hard drive. Before I install any major program, I do a complete backup so I don't have to worry about having to do a complete install of all programs again. I just go to the last image backed up , install and everything is good. I can swear that it has saved me so many times when things have gone array. And even if things are running good I still do a complete image backup after a couple of weeks just to stay up to date with updated driver installs and Win7 updates. Even if your SSD fails, just install the backup onto a new SSD. It is well worth the investment as it takes between 30 to 45 min. to do a backup (pending on the size of your HD), and you can set it up to shut down your computer when it has finished. A reinstall of the image takes about the same time, and you don't have to enter your BIOS to run the install. I know other members use, and attest to it on this forum, and that is what put me onto it. After going through a few agonizing sessions of total OS installs, it was the best buck spent for any program. Definitely takes the stress and pain out screw ups. Didn't mean to go into a rant, but I feel your pain, hopefully you get things up and running... but check out the program for peace of mind. Good luck. (I have no affiliation with Acronis)

I run two instances of W7 stored on separate drives. I initially installed W7 allowed it to update and then loaded favourite NLE's and plugins. At that stage I saved an image to my video drive D. Then replaced my system drive with a clean HD and used my W7 install disc to load the image onto the new system disc. At this stage I renamed the computer before adding the original system disc back into the computer. Now if I restore an image I usually boot to the appropriate drive use Windows to restore the image. When I added a SDD both of my system drives were physically disconnected and the SSD installed. Again I used the windows system disc to replace load the image. I suspect all my disks have the same ID. All my system discs are 256Gb.

"Seems I was right off the planet, and needed to physically replace the SSD with the HDD, or at least change the jumpers to make the HDD look like drive C (no fiddling with the bios)"

This "c" drive... "d" drive stuff is not part of the computer but rather part of windows (written into the registry). In other words the computer doesn't know who or where or what c drive is. Only windows knows that. Once you boot into what ever windows version you're booting to, it will be recognized as the official "C" drive. The only thing you need to do is REDIRECT the boot to the proper drive which of course is done through the bios. Now there are software boot loaders like BOOTitNG which allow you to boot to what ever os without having to diddle with the bios every time but Disk imaging (as opposed to cloning) might be a better bet though for you in the future if you have no interest in running multiple os's

Disk imaging basically duplicates your drive and compresses it into a file which can be stored anywhere Then when something goes wrong you simply recall your disk image and load it back onto THE SAME drive and it is all EXACTLY the same when you took that image.