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

submitted 10 months 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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[–] otherbarry 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What I'd do is double-check which partition is marked as bootable/active on the old SSD, then after cloning make sure the new SSD is configured the same. On a Windows 10/11 boot USB you can usually go into the command line & run diskpart to do those things, alternatively you do the same in Linux if you're already using that instead.

I don't think cloning disks would necessarily mark any partitions as bootable so that's an extra step you may need to do.

Clonezilla typically works well enough when you're doing the entire drive though I've never needed to tinker with bitlocker so can't say if that changes things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Bitlocker was off when I tried Clonezilla. I'll check for the partition flags. I wonder where they live, if they are not brought over in a bit-for-bit copy? Thanks for the help!