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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey, thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it!

Clonezilla indeed takes care of all the partitioning and the flags. I cloned the old SSD to the new SSD once more and it of course still won't boot. (Never mind that partition 3 of old SSD says bitlocker- I reenabled it after taking the disk image.)

This is really frustrating. It's not even about the data since everything is synced to my server anyway, but installing all the software again and tweaking everything so it feels like "my" system is just a lot of effort I would have liked to avoid. Starting to come to terms with the fact that it isn't happening. I probably won't do it, but I have half a mind to ditch Windows again. If only MS Office didn't make such a convincing argument in my day-to-day...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's annoying.. even doing a Startup Repair with the Windows 11 USB doesn't repair it and get it starting up? Thinking on a normal install all this should have already worked, makes me wonder if Bitlocker is somehow a culprit here.

But I guess worst case is to back up your data, do a fresh install of Windows 11, restore your data/re-install applications & move on. At some point that's going to end up being faster than troubleshooting failed cloning attempts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I have reached that point yesterday. Gave it one last shot with MS' own system image tool and same results. The upside - doing a system recovery with the "keep my data" option actually worked okay. User data, ssh keys and so on still there, and an HTML file on the Desktop with a list of all the apps that were removed. Could have been worse... Thanks again for the help!