Nomad of Norad
Extraordinary Member
- Joined
- Jan 9, 2009
- Messages
- 212
- Thread Author
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- #1
I'm up a gumtree without a paddle. I have been running around in circles for a week trying to get this solved.
I had migrated my old HDD with Windows 10 Pro on it over to a new machine, and a new SATA SSD drive. I used Macrium Reflect to image the drive over. This was an MBR booted system. I did have to use the boot loader repair feature of the Macrium Rescue disc (burned to a DVD-R) to get it to boot, because the Windows repair disc couldn't fix it. I then made backups of that to my files drive on the same machine (migrated over from the old machine) and which is still working fine (It is a server-grade, 13 or 14 terabyte drive), and did this till the trial version of Macrium expired, figuring I'd get around to buying it NEXT month or something... and kept kicking the can down the road again and again to NEXT month . Anyway, everything was fine since January, when I did the migration, and you don't expect hardware problems after only a few short months, so I wasn't in a huge hurry on this.
Friday a week ago, my SSD stopped booting altogether, with the machine telling me some message about please select a bootable drive. On two earlier occasions, it had given me that error, and I'd been able to do a repair-the-MBR thing from command line, and just go back to it booting fine again. This time, nothing I could do could get that to work. I finally took the machine to a local computer-repair shop, figuring they would be able to examine what was corrupting the MBR and fix it more expertly than I can... but it turned out the drive wasn't even showing as active, and only sometimes being readable.... which means the SSD was about dead. After only 8 months of service. Turns out the drive make and model was one that had a reputation for failing in a short period of time, because it was some expiremental hybrid of drive technology, or something of the sort. Anyway, he was going to run some process on the drive to try to retrieve as much off of it as he could, but it never got past the 20% mark, and he needed it to be at the 30% mark before he could get to the files and start pulling stuff off the drive.
Anyway, I had brought my old spinning-rust HDD I'd migrated from, and I mentioned I had my Macrium backups from January and into early February on the files drive in the machine. I left the machine with him, saying I needed what was on the HDD, or those backups, to be on the replacement C drivee. In this case, it was going to be one of those newer sorts of stick-of-ram-sized drives onto the motherboard.
Well, Monday I went to get my machine, and to see what the progress was on salvaging data off the SSD, to find that instead of migrating my existing C install over, he'd simply installed a fresh Windows 10 Home onto the device (my old setup was Windows 10 Pro! :O ) and he simply told me to reinstall all my software, and when I asked him why he'd gone this route, he said that trying to clone from an HDD to an SSD wasn't the right approach, because cloning a drive might carry over damaged sectors or something of the sort, and that "most people do it THIS OTHER way anyway." He also had copied over to it the folders of Desktop, Documents, Pictures, and Downloads (but didn't bring over my Roaming folder, where all my massive amounts of chatlogs and many, many software settings are)... which, I can still DO that, but...
Here's the thing. I've gotten a LOT of stuff configured and tweaked exactly the way I wanted it on this machine, going back years. I've got, like 10,000 different login credentials stored in the browser settings (which... well... all of that is probably in the old Roaming, but still) and a whole lot of pluggins and whatnot that I'd have to all re-implant back onto the new install, and a LOT of old programs of various sorts. Also I needed to be back up and running slam bang fast in order to at least partly pick back right up where I'd left off on a lot of projects, communications, and whatnot going on on the machine. Even with having to update some of the software from the version from 8 months ago to the current version, and recreate some of my more recent Daz Studio render scenes from scratch, I still would have had all my settings, (older) chatlogs, and whatnot from before intact.
Also, plenty of research online I looked at over the past week tells me that all the modern disk clone software are designed specifically with migration from HDD to SDD fully in mind, and will simply skip damaged sectors or missing data when migrating you over.
Anyway, after two or three days of looking into all that, I said to myself, "Fine, I'll just do the restore myself." As a precaution, I installed a fresh Macrium Reflect trial edition on the new install, and backed that image up fully, then wrote my old image onto the drive in its place.
I'm pretty sure I've gotten the drive image restored from my Macrium backups, with all the content and all the OS stuff there, but no matter what I do, I can't get past the make-it-bootable part of the process. My old image is MBR legacy boot, they set the new drive to GPT on UEFI, although at least the BIOS isn't set to secure boot. Also, because he made this a Windows 10 HOME install, simply plopping the C partition over from the (Windows 10 Pro) backup image into the C partition of the drive isn't going to work because its the wrong version of Windows 10 on there, nevermind it being the wrong bootloader type. After a few hours at a time, banging my head against a wall trying to get it to work, I'd eventually restore the other, Win10 Home image back on and boot back to that, so I could get at least SOME things done... such as asking Grok what to do, and getting the right doodads and whatnot to do that, and to also get back onto my Discord account and whatnot. Bear in mind, I'm reluctant to manually change the drive-access settings to Legacy mode for fear I'll now not be able to get back to the NEW-installed image bootable again. But I need a way to reliably convert the MBR legacy boot mode of the January drive image over to being GPT UEFI, without losing any data on the drive.
Anyway, I've been banging my head against a wall on this for a week, while getting hugely frustrated the whole time, and going round and round and round in circles trying to get the January image working, then going back to the Win10Home image, before trying the January image again. I need a bulletproof way to get my old image running on the new machine, without buying this, that, and the other paid doodad only to find out that won't fix it either. This is maddening.
Should I simply take my machine to another shop and have them do it for me? I am at my wits end on this.
I had migrated my old HDD with Windows 10 Pro on it over to a new machine, and a new SATA SSD drive. I used Macrium Reflect to image the drive over. This was an MBR booted system. I did have to use the boot loader repair feature of the Macrium Rescue disc (burned to a DVD-R) to get it to boot, because the Windows repair disc couldn't fix it. I then made backups of that to my files drive on the same machine (migrated over from the old machine) and which is still working fine (It is a server-grade, 13 or 14 terabyte drive), and did this till the trial version of Macrium expired, figuring I'd get around to buying it NEXT month or something... and kept kicking the can down the road again and again to NEXT month . Anyway, everything was fine since January, when I did the migration, and you don't expect hardware problems after only a few short months, so I wasn't in a huge hurry on this.
Friday a week ago, my SSD stopped booting altogether, with the machine telling me some message about please select a bootable drive. On two earlier occasions, it had given me that error, and I'd been able to do a repair-the-MBR thing from command line, and just go back to it booting fine again. This time, nothing I could do could get that to work. I finally took the machine to a local computer-repair shop, figuring they would be able to examine what was corrupting the MBR and fix it more expertly than I can... but it turned out the drive wasn't even showing as active, and only sometimes being readable.... which means the SSD was about dead. After only 8 months of service. Turns out the drive make and model was one that had a reputation for failing in a short period of time, because it was some expiremental hybrid of drive technology, or something of the sort. Anyway, he was going to run some process on the drive to try to retrieve as much off of it as he could, but it never got past the 20% mark, and he needed it to be at the 30% mark before he could get to the files and start pulling stuff off the drive.
Anyway, I had brought my old spinning-rust HDD I'd migrated from, and I mentioned I had my Macrium backups from January and into early February on the files drive in the machine. I left the machine with him, saying I needed what was on the HDD, or those backups, to be on the replacement C drivee. In this case, it was going to be one of those newer sorts of stick-of-ram-sized drives onto the motherboard.
Well, Monday I went to get my machine, and to see what the progress was on salvaging data off the SSD, to find that instead of migrating my existing C install over, he'd simply installed a fresh Windows 10 Home onto the device (my old setup was Windows 10 Pro! :O ) and he simply told me to reinstall all my software, and when I asked him why he'd gone this route, he said that trying to clone from an HDD to an SSD wasn't the right approach, because cloning a drive might carry over damaged sectors or something of the sort, and that "most people do it THIS OTHER way anyway." He also had copied over to it the folders of Desktop, Documents, Pictures, and Downloads (but didn't bring over my Roaming folder, where all my massive amounts of chatlogs and many, many software settings are)... which, I can still DO that, but...
Here's the thing. I've gotten a LOT of stuff configured and tweaked exactly the way I wanted it on this machine, going back years. I've got, like 10,000 different login credentials stored in the browser settings (which... well... all of that is probably in the old Roaming, but still) and a whole lot of pluggins and whatnot that I'd have to all re-implant back onto the new install, and a LOT of old programs of various sorts. Also I needed to be back up and running slam bang fast in order to at least partly pick back right up where I'd left off on a lot of projects, communications, and whatnot going on on the machine. Even with having to update some of the software from the version from 8 months ago to the current version, and recreate some of my more recent Daz Studio render scenes from scratch, I still would have had all my settings, (older) chatlogs, and whatnot from before intact.
Also, plenty of research online I looked at over the past week tells me that all the modern disk clone software are designed specifically with migration from HDD to SDD fully in mind, and will simply skip damaged sectors or missing data when migrating you over.
Anyway, after two or three days of looking into all that, I said to myself, "Fine, I'll just do the restore myself." As a precaution, I installed a fresh Macrium Reflect trial edition on the new install, and backed that image up fully, then wrote my old image onto the drive in its place.
I'm pretty sure I've gotten the drive image restored from my Macrium backups, with all the content and all the OS stuff there, but no matter what I do, I can't get past the make-it-bootable part of the process. My old image is MBR legacy boot, they set the new drive to GPT on UEFI, although at least the BIOS isn't set to secure boot. Also, because he made this a Windows 10 HOME install, simply plopping the C partition over from the (Windows 10 Pro) backup image into the C partition of the drive isn't going to work because its the wrong version of Windows 10 on there, nevermind it being the wrong bootloader type. After a few hours at a time, banging my head against a wall trying to get it to work, I'd eventually restore the other, Win10 Home image back on and boot back to that, so I could get at least SOME things done... such as asking Grok what to do, and getting the right doodads and whatnot to do that, and to also get back onto my Discord account and whatnot. Bear in mind, I'm reluctant to manually change the drive-access settings to Legacy mode for fear I'll now not be able to get back to the NEW-installed image bootable again. But I need a way to reliably convert the MBR legacy boot mode of the January drive image over to being GPT UEFI, without losing any data on the drive.
Anyway, I've been banging my head against a wall on this for a week, while getting hugely frustrated the whole time, and going round and round and round in circles trying to get the January image working, then going back to the Win10Home image, before trying the January image again. I need a bulletproof way to get my old image running on the new machine, without buying this, that, and the other paid doodad only to find out that won't fix it either. This is maddening.
Should I simply take my machine to another shop and have them do it for me? I am at my wits end on this.