11-23-2015, 08:22 AM
After more testing and comparing my partitioning to other drives, I've determined the solution to this.
For WinToUsb to work with this drive (SATA SSD connected via a USB-Sata adapter) you *must* create two partitions; one small one (200-400MB NTFS) which is not assigned a drive letter that you will mark as the system, and a second, large volume that will be used as boot.
This was not necessary with removable USB thumbdrive media (and tricky to do anyway). And for some reason it was also not necessary when I installed Win7 to a WD Passport 2TB drive. I'm still not sure why this particular SSD setup did require two partitions, but hopefully this will help someone in the future with this problem.
While the error given was correct in its own way, it really did not point to the root cause here.
For WinToUsb to work with this drive (SATA SSD connected via a USB-Sata adapter) you *must* create two partitions; one small one (200-400MB NTFS) which is not assigned a drive letter that you will mark as the system, and a second, large volume that will be used as boot.
This was not necessary with removable USB thumbdrive media (and tricky to do anyway). And for some reason it was also not necessary when I installed Win7 to a WD Passport 2TB drive. I'm still not sure why this particular SSD setup did require two partitions, but hopefully this will help someone in the future with this problem.
While the error given was correct in its own way, it really did not point to the root cause here.