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Trouble cloning Win 11 SSD (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 2 years ago by tofubl@discuss.tchncs.de to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

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Hi everyone, looking for help with an SSD/Win problem: My Thinkpad with Win11 has been acting up lately, and I am fairly sure the problem is with the SSD (very high disk load on startup and shortly before each of the many many crashes.) I would like to avoid having to set up my system from scratch.

I have a new SSD and have tried the following:

leave bitlocker intact, boot into Ubuntu live, dd the old disk to an external USB drive, install new SSD, dd disk to new SSD
same as above but with bitlocker disabled
boot into Clonezilla live, clone old SSD to external storage, clone external storage to new SSD
clean Windows install on new SSD and clone c: partition to new SSD with Clonezilla

All of these attempts invariably lead to an "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE" blue screen, and "bootrec /fixboot" and the like executed from the recovery CMD shows "0 Windows installations found." Booting into Ubuntu live with the cloned SSD installed I can see all my user data intact with no apparent problems.

Is my old SSD/Windows installation broken beyond repair and do I have to accept it and move on or am I missing something?

Thanks for any help or pointers!

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[–] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (7 children)

Make sure the EFI partition has the "boot, esp" label and the Windows partition has the "msftdata" label. That'll help the windows boot fixer find stuff. Also bootrec /rebuildbcd

[–] tofubl@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I see 4 partitions in GParted after attempt 4 as described in my post:

p1 fat32, boot/hidden/esp 260MB
p2 unknown, msftres 16MB
p3 ntfs, msftdata 470GB (this is the one I cloned from the old SSD)
p4 ntfs, hidden/diag 1000MB

So, seems correct?

[–] otherbarry@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

That sort of looks right, did the old SSD have the same configuration? According to that partition list you also have an extra partition, maybe a Lenovo recovery/repair partition or something bitlocker related. Your old SSD probably has p1 or p2 a bootable.

Overall you don't need to do it this way but what I'd do roughly speaking..

Format the new SSD, make sure the partition style is the same as old SSD (GPT vs MBR) - Maybe Clonezilla already takes care of that? I can't remember offhand
Note which partition is active/bootable on the old SSD
Use Clonezilla to clone the whole drive, all partitions
Make sure the newly cloned SSD has the correct active/bootable partition
Go into your BIOS, make sure the newly installed drive is still the first/second boot device (on a laptop it should be, in theory) - second if you want to keep your USB drives booting first for troubleshooting
Try to boot up - If Windows still isn't coming up then boot into your Windows 11 USB and try to "repair" the Windows install e.g. instead of installing try to go into Repair, Troubleshoot, Startup Repair

PS - Probably not what you want but worst case you can do a clean install of Windows 11 & then manually copy over your data (back up first!). Maybe not ideal but at least you'll have a fresh install to work with.

[–] tofubl@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 years ago

When you say

Note which partition is active/bootable on the old SSD

you mean which partition has the "boot" flag, correct?

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