Windows 7 windows update broken after disk clone

Would love an explanation as to what in fact broke when the disk was cloned and why the intel driver fixed it.

To summarize:  I think I did what many others did.  I used Aoemi to clone my 500GB drive (which actually itself was a clone of the original 320GB drive) to a new 1 TB drive.  Everything seemed to work after cloning, except that Outlook 2010 needed to repopulate all its folders from Exchange.  But all other apps and my data were fine.

But Windows search and Windows update were completely inop.  The MS tool to repair Search did not work.

However the Intel driver worked like a charm.  I guess I simply don't understand why these two services became inop.  Is there an issue with modern high capacity drives?  And why is it an intel fix rather than an ms fix.  If it helps my o/s is Win 7 64.

this worked for me too.  My laptop is a Gateway EC-14.  I had to download the executable with another computer and used a memory stick to bring it over to my laptop.  Running the executable installed the drivers and Intel Control Centre (probably don't need that thou) but it works great now. I was not able to download from my laptop as many functions did not work properly with the older driver.

I too cloned a smaller driver to a bigger drive (seagate 500 mb to WDC 1 TB) and can't do windows update and can't install the patches to fix the problem.

The fundamental problem is that installing an MSU requires the Windows Update service which is what is erroring out.

How do I bust out the msu package and 'just' install the update without wusa?

I suggest you run the Microsoft Genuine Advantage Diagnostics Tool in normal mode and copy and paste the results in a reply for further analysis:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=52012

Run the Tool and when it completes click the Copy button, open a text file like Word or Notepad and select Edit, Paste. You can paste directly into a reply here. Open a reply, right click and select Paste.

Ok, I got my system working and I think I really understand the problem now.

1)  I don't think it would matter what cloning software was used.

2. Once you are broken it is very hard to do updates because the Windows Update Service is busted and that affects the ability to install things like MSU files, etc.

The new, bigger, Western Digital drive that I bought used advanced formatting and basically that means that the sector size is no longer 512 bytes.  The old storage array driver for the motherboard component (in my case an INTEL piece of hardware) needs to be current to correctly report back the disk status.  Since you can't install a 'package' I ended up going to the INTEL website and getting the WINZIP download of the INF and other files needed to successfully to the update to the storage array driver.  I initiated that update with a right click on the specific item in Device Manager and told it to update pointing it to the folder I had unzipped the INTEL files.  Once the bigger sector size is reported correctly, then Windows Update starts working again and all is well.

Had I been smart, I could have done the driver update before the old drive failed and then the clone would have had the new driver and I would never have known I might have had a problem.

Those compatibility patches that are mentioned elsewhere for the advanced format drives are good too....but insufficient to make things work by themselves. 

All the comments about saving the windows update files are good too...but not necessary if the driver gets updated before break Windows Update.  It is a pain if you lose your update history and you have to paw through the updates you previously applied.

And the comments about registering various DLLs, etc are probably needed in some cases where the cloning really didn't go well.

Bottom line, get the storage array driver updated first.