trying to upgrade HDD and clone disk fail

[Simon]

I have a problem. I have a mecahnical HDD with 3 partitions and windows on it. Now i want to move to a SSD but cloning has not worked because the partition alone was not bootable as that will be down to the MBR that was not copied over. What do i do ?

[Gringo]

Hi!  Are all partitions from windows ?  What cloning utility did you use?

[AlfBaz]

Do you know what file system the partitions are? Also what version of windows are you trying to do this from.

FDISK use to be the command of choice back in the day when FAT32 ruled supreme. It doesn't, however work with NTFS. For that you use the Windows disk management utility

[IanB]

I have a problem. I have a mecahnical HDD with 3 partitions and windows on it. Now i want to move to a SSD but cloning has not worked because the partition alone was not bootable as that will be down to the MBR that was not copied over. What do i do ?

When moving to an SSD use the cloning software provided by the SSD vendor. If it doesn't work your disk can't be cloned.

But also beware that transferring an HDD to an SSD is an incredibly bad idea. Magnetic disks have vastly greater data security than solid state disks. If you really want to do this, do a fresh OS install on the SSD and keep your important data on the hard disk as a second disk. If your data is important, don't put it on an SSD without daily backups.

[Simon]

Well I formated it with NTFS as the source disk is. It's a kingston disk so don't know if they have a utility.

[IanB]

Well I formated it with NTFS as the source disk is. It's a kingston disk so don't know if they have a utility.

This doesn't sound right. You shouldn't have to do any manual partitioning or formatting. Normally the OS installation software or the disk copying software does this for you.

When you use the cloning software it recreates the same partitions on the target disk as on the source disk and makes the target disk bootable. If you want to make an image copy of a first disk onto a second disk it is essential to use the appropriate cloning software. Otherwise it won't work. Since SSDs are special it is even more important to use the vendor supplied software to do the image copy.

Check the instructions that came with the disk, or check the Kingston web site.

[mtdoc]

But also beware that transferring an HDD to an SSD is an incredibly bad idea. Magnetic disks have vastly greater data security than solid state disks. If you really want to do this, do a fresh OS install on the SSD and keep your important data on the hard disk as a second disk. If your data is important, don't put it on an SSD without daily backups.

I don't have a strong opinion on this but if you listen to the recent Amp Hour podcast interview with Chuck Peddle (#241), I think he would disagree.

[Simon]

I used clonezilla live CD and did a partition to partition copy. Maybe i need to do an image file backup and then restore the image to the new disk.

[IanB]

I don't have a strong opinion on this but if you listen to the recent Amp Hour podcast interview with Chuck Peddle (#241), I think he would disagree.

Well granted I have never had any issues with the storage in my phone or tablet, but my one experience with trying to put an SSD in a Windows machine did not go well. The disk cloned and booted fine and worked OK for an hour and then it went poof! and became unreadable. The data became entirely scrambled such that disk utilities could not recognize anything on the disk at all. So I accept that my experience was a sample of one, but I really can't feel secure about my data being stored in a bunch of electrons.

[IanB]

I used clonezilla live CD and did a partition to partition copy. Maybe i need to do an image file backup and then restore the image to the new disk.

All I can say is that when I have moved old disks to new disks I have used the tools provided by Seagate, WD or Samsung as appropriate. Each time I followed the instructions from the drive manufacturer and it worked perfectly. The new disk gets recreated so that it boots just like the old disk.

[G7PSK]

It is best to use a cloning kit like this.

https://youtu.be/8WdBp1zrePE

[Simon]

It's kingston they don't have a tool, I did a technical chat online and they recommended a commercial package to use. so basically I'm on my own.

[G7PSK]

Kingston supply software on a disc that comes with the SSD it is shown in the youtube link I put up previously one reason I chose that particular one. I have been looking into an SSD for my Panasonic CF19 and from what I have seen to date I am not sure that I wouldl go with Kingston.

[IanB]

Usually the vendor provided tool is a free version of a third party tool like Acronis. I have never bought a disk that did not come with cloning instructions and a link to a free tool, just like in the YouTube video. So I'm not sure why Kingston would not be offering such a tool (any more)?

[Kjelt]

Which Windows, if it is 7 or higher Windows can do this itself.
If that does not work (happened to me because the target hdd was smaller than the original) I went to a linux expert that helped me with some linux command lines activating the bootrecord, no way I remember how he did it but was 5 minutes work.

But the best way is just setup your Windows OS from scratch on the SSD.

[Simon]

It's 7 so how do I do it with windows ?

[Kjelt]

Just google on "windows 7 transfer to ssd"

Windows 7 has a built in backup and restore program.

You Backup your original data to an external (extra spare) USB harddrive. 
You create a boot / recovery disk for Win7.
Replace your original harddisk with the SSD.
Boot from the boot / recovery disk and a utility starts up , select the external image on the USB disk.
And restore. reboot finished.

If you run into problems with the booting like a 0xC0000225, just google and you find the right solutions, like:

http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/228493-windows-boot-hangs-error-0xc0000225.html

[amyk]

If the new disk is >= in size to the old one, then a plain old sector-by-sector copy of the whole disk will just work. Something like dd from a Linux boot CD - just make sure you get the source and destination disks correct!

You can use something like gparted to resize the partitions afterwards if the new disk is bigger.

SSDs look exactly like any other type of disk to the OS. Same interface. There's some performance tweaks you can do, but otherwise it's as easy as installing a regular spinning disk.

[free_electron]

make sure your SSD is larger than the HDD ....

[G7PSK]

Will the windows utility transfer all the non windows drivers as well, I want to install an SSD in a panasonic CF19 MK2. It has 32 special drivers which have to be installed in exactly the right order otherwise they will not work. I recently installed a new 500MB HD and it took nearly 3 days to sort out, I installed WIN.7 64 bit. it was originally built for Vista. I found that some of the Vista drivers worked but other would not and had to by trial and error find drivers from  the MK3 and 4 versions that would do the trick and I dont fancy having to go through that again but I gathe an SSD will make the machine a whole lot faster.

[Simon]

Will the windows utility transfer all the non windows drivers as well, I want to install an SSD in a panasonic CF19 MK2. It has 32 special drivers which have to be installed in exactly the right order otherwise they will not work. I recently installed a new 500MB HD and it took nearly 3 days to sort out, I installed WIN.7 64 bit. it was originally built for Vista. I found that some of the Vista drivers worked but other would not and had to by trial and error find drivers from  the MK3 and 4 versions that would do the trick and I dont fancy having to go through that again but I gathe an SSD will make the machine a whole lot faster.

just make sure it is a decent machine. I've put an SSD in a netbook for a friend because the mechanical drive was damaged and judging by the state of the machine it gets a rough time. It's  not that fast asa it has a crappy atom processor running at 1.66 GHz so in effect the disk is likely to be faster than the rest of the machine.

my problem is not the sector by sector copying but a lack of a boot record to make it boot

[AlfBaz]

I have a problem. I have a mecahnical HDD with 3 partitions and windows on it. Now i want to move to a SSD but cloning has not worked because the partition alone was not bootable as that will be down to the MBR that was not copied over. What do i do ?

So you only want the windows partition on the SSD and not the other 2?

[Simon]

I have a problem. I have a mecahnical HDD with 3 partitions and windows on it. Now i want to move to a SSD but cloning has not worked because the partition alone was not bootable as that will be down to the MBR that was not copied over. What do i do ?

So you only want the windows partition on the SSD and not the other 2?

Yes problem is the MBR is not on that partition so I'm just creating a disk full of data.

[Monkeh]

I have a problem. I have a mecahnical HDD with 3 partitions and windows on it. Now i want to move to a SSD but cloning has not worked because the partition alone was not bootable as that will be down to the MBR that was not copied over. What do i do ?

So you only want the windows partition on the SSD and not the other 2?

Yes problem is the MBR is not on that partition so I'm just creating a disk full of data.

So create the partition table you need and copy the bootblock over.

Any Linux bootdisk, the tools fdisk and dd, their respective manpages, and any of the thousands of sites which describe the format of the MBR will assist you with this.

[AlfBaz]

So create the partition table you need and copy the bootblock over.

Any Linux bootdisk, the tools fdisk and dd, their respective manpages, and any of the thousands of sites which describe the format of the MBR will assist you with this.

Not entirely sure it's that simple, windows 7 and NTFS combined have a slightly different MBR. For FAT32 the MBR is 446 bytes of boot code followed by 4 partition structures pointing to where on the disk they are and finally the signature 0xAA55

NTFS has the bios parameter block followed by what they call the bootstrap code and finally the sig 0xAA55

What might work is to boot from your W7 install cd with the SSD installed as main C: drive, format it within the install and then quit the install. Then simply copy all the files from you windows partition over to the SSD. I'm sure there must be other ways to create a bootable NTFS drive which you can then copy you windows partition to but I'll leave you and google alone with that one

[G7PSK]

Here is a link on how to re create the MBR for Win.7

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/20864-mbr-restore-windows-7-master-boot-record.html

[Monkeh]

So create the partition table you need and copy the bootblock over.

Any Linux bootdisk, the tools fdisk and dd, their respective manpages, and any of the thousands of sites which describe the format of the MBR will assist you with this.

Not entirely sure it's that simple, windows 7 and NTFS combined have a slightly different MBR. For FAT32 the MBR is 446 bytes of boot code followed by 4 partition structures pointing to where on the disk they are and finally the signature 0xAA55

NTFS has the bios parameter block followed by what they call the bootstrap code and finally the sig 0xAA55

NTFS and FAT32 have nothing to do with the MBR. The MBR is 512 bytes and the 446 bytes allocated to boot code has never changed. Some OSes have inserted bits of data in the middle of the boot code, and current systems have a disk signature stuffed in the last 6 bytes of it, that doesn't change much and has nothing to do with the filesystem(s) in place.

It is most certainly simple and I've done it a number of times. Tricking Microsoft's awful boot code into doing as it's told is kind of a hobby.

There's always the rather offensive, non-compatible MBR layouts used by proprietary tools to make life fun, though. Those sort of went away when we started using EBR.

[G7PSK]

Here's how using Linux.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/5748/how-to-restore-windows-7-mbr-without-a-cd

[AlfBaz]

So create the partition table you need and copy the bootblock over.

Any Linux bootdisk, the tools fdisk and dd, their respective manpages, and any of the thousands of sites which describe the format of the MBR will assist you with this.

Not entirely sure it's that simple, windows 7 and NTFS combined have a slightly different MBR. For FAT32 the MBR is 446 bytes of boot code followed by 4 partition structures pointing to where on the disk they are and finally the signature 0xAA55

NTFS has the bios parameter block followed by what they call the bootstrap code and finally the sig 0xAA55

NTFS and FAT32 have nothing to do with the MBR. The MBR is 512 bytes and the 446 bytes allocated to boot code has never changed. Some OSes have inserted bits of data in the middle of the boot code, and current systems have a disk signature stuffed in the last 6 bytes of it, that doesn't change much and has nothing to do with the filesystem(s) in place.

It is most certainly simple and I've done it a number of times. Tricking Microsoft's awful boot code into doing as it's told is kind of a hobby.

There's always the rather offensive, non-compatible MBR layouts used by proprietary tools to make life fun, though. Those sort of went away when we started using EBR.

I just had a quick look and the boot code was definitely in at a different offset in the 2 types of MBR but they sorted it by changing the jump offset in the 3 byte jump code at the start EB xx 90, eb being jmp and 90 being nop

[Monkeh]

So create the partition table you need and copy the bootblock over.

Any Linux bootdisk, the tools fdisk and dd, their respective manpages, and any of the thousands of sites which describe the format of the MBR will assist you with this.

Not entirely sure it's that simple, windows 7 and NTFS combined have a slightly different MBR. For FAT32 the MBR is 446 bytes of boot code followed by 4 partition structures pointing to where on the disk they are and finally the signature 0xAA55

NTFS has the bios parameter block followed by what they call the bootstrap code and finally the sig 0xAA55

NTFS and FAT32 have nothing to do with the MBR. The MBR is 512 bytes and the 446 bytes allocated to boot code has never changed. Some OSes have inserted bits of data in the middle of the boot code, and current systems have a disk signature stuffed in the last 6 bytes of it, that doesn't change much and has nothing to do with the filesystem(s) in place.

It is most certainly simple and I've done it a number of times. Tricking Microsoft's awful boot code into doing as it's told is kind of a hobby.

There's always the rather offensive, non-compatible MBR layouts used by proprietary tools to make life fun, though. Those sort of went away when we started using EBR.

I just had a quick look and the boot code was definitely in at a different offset in the 2 types of MBR but they sorted it by changing the jump offset in the 3 byte jump code at the start EB xx 90, eb being jmp and 90 being nop

And would you care to show the MBR layout where the 446 bytes of boot code doesn't begin at 0?

If you're talking about NEWLDR that's just boot code. You'll note the partition table still begins at byte 446.

None of this is relevant to simply moving the existing boot coode, complete with signature, to a new drive. So long as you change the signature on the other drive before trying to boot an OS which cares about it.

[AlfBaz]

And would you care to show the MBR layout where the 446 bytes of boot code doesn't begin at 0?

No I don't care. I was merely pointing out there was a difference that I had observed and this caused me to think FAT32 and NTSF used different MBR's.

The one thing I'm not understanding is the boot code has to access data on the drive. Wouldn't that code be different depending on what file system is being used or is ntfs and FAT32 not that dissimilar. I'm very well versed with FAT32 but know diddly squat about NTFS

[Monkeh]

And would you care to show the MBR layout where the 446 bytes of boot code doesn't begin at 0?

No I don't care. I was merely pointing out there was a difference that I had observed and this caused me to think FAT32 and NTSF used different MBR's.

The one thing I'm not understanding is the boot code has to access data on the drive. Wouldn't that code be different depending on what file system is being used or is ntfs and FAT32 not that dissimilar. I'm very well versed with FAT32 but know diddly squat about NTFS

I am not familiar with the detailed inner workings of Microsoft bootloaders (I just abuse them, I don't write 'em), but yes, in general you do need to access the filesystem. I'm not entirely sure how they stuff the code to handle different filesystems in but they manage. They may leverage the VBR to handle filesystem-specific code.

[AlfBaz]

And would you care to show the MBR layout where the 446 bytes of boot code doesn't begin at 0?

Sorry misread that
I don't think I've ever come across boot code starting at byte zero, jump code yes but not the 446 bytes of actual boot code

[AlfBaz]

I'm not entirely sure how they stuff the code to handle different filesystems in but they manage.

Looking at the embedded ascii text it looks quite likely that BOOTMGR may be placed somewhere simple to find, perhaps in a couple of the reserved sectors before the FAT or what ever it's called in NTFS

[Monkeh]

And would you care to show the MBR layout where the 446 bytes of boot code doesn't begin at 0?

Sorry misread that
I don't think I've ever come across boot code starting at byte zero, jump code yes but not the 446 bytes of actual boot code

The boot code always starts at byte 0. Just because what's put there jumps somewhere else, doesn't make the boot code not at byte 0. The MBR is 512 bytes, the first 446 are boot code. Use as you will, that includes jumping further down it so you can have a signature at a specific offset. If you do this you lose some code space, because there's only 512 bytes to play with, 64 of them are partition entries, and 2 are the end signature.

[rdl]

Well, you can beat your head against the wall all you want, but I can just about guarantee that the easiest, quickest, and least headache inducing solution is to just do a fresh install of Windows on the new drive. I can't say that I've ever seen an existing Windows install transfer to new hardware and still work 100% correctly.

[Monkeh]

Well, you can beat your head against the wall all you want, but I can just about guarantee that the easiest, quickest, and least headache inducing solution is to just do a fresh install of Windows on the new drive. I can't say that I've ever seen an existing Windows install transfer to new hardware and still work 100% correctly.

It's a drive. It'll never know.

You can swap CPUs too. Whole motherboards. GPUs. Just for the love of god, don't try and change the HDD controller.

[madires]

Please see https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-mbr/ for re-installing/fixing the boot loader.

[rdl]

It's a drive. It'll never know.

That's probably true these days, but in the time that's already been wasted trying and failing to clone, Windows could have been installed and up and running. And with a fresh new clean Registry to boot. It's a relatively quick and painless thing to do.

[Monkeh]

It's a drive. It'll never know.

That's probably true these days, but in the time that's already been wasted trying and failing to clone, Windows could have been installed and up and running. And with a fresh new clean Registry to boot. It's a relatively quick and painless thing to do.

For you, perhaps, for others, many hours have to be spent unbreaking the OS.