Restore to a 2nd SSD made my 1st SSD unbootable (fixed...but how?)
New PC build, my first UEFI motherboard, my first Win10 install. A couple days in I make a backup image of my system SSD (using ATI2020 x64 boot media).
(As I always do with a new PC or backup program) I want to make sure I can restore it (until one does one never really knows one has a backup in my experience). Attempting to avoid disaster (which I have only a vague understanding of from past such disasters), I remove the system SSD from it's M.2 slot first. Then I restore the backup image to a different SSD in a different M.2 slot.
Attempting to avoid the aforementioned disaster, I boot into Hirens PE to format the 2nd SSD; I learn I can't, because Windows Disk Management can't delete EFI partitions. I learn how to do so in DISKPART.
Unfortunately (I'm thinking) instead of doing so in Hirens, at this point I incautiously return the 1st SSD to the 1st M.2 slot, and boot to it, and use DISKPART to CLEAN the 2nd SSD of partitions.
Once I restarted the PC I was stunned to find (and am still unclear on the specifics of why this happened) that my 1st SSD could no longer boot. No matter what boot options I chose.
So I made another backup of the SSD that couldn't boot (in case I found it's contents were AOK), then tried restoring each. The first backup once restored did boot (hallelujah!), but the new backup once restored still wouldn't boot.
But I seek understanding please:
Since deleting the EFI on the 2nd SSD made the 1st SSD unbootable, I guess that it somehow became 'dependent' for booting upon the 2nd SSD's EFI. (Not an unfamiliar situation to me, hence my removing the 1st SSD initially.)
Question: Would I have been OK had I run the DISKPART CLEAN in Hirens before returning the 1st SSD to it's slot?
Question: Is there anything I should know to help me avoid this (and what is this?) situation of a system drive needing another drive to boot?
Thank you very much, Steve, for the specifics.
I guess that though I of course installed with only one disk in the PC, when I later booted with two disks with an EFI, MS decided via some mysterious-to-me mechanism that the EFI I wanted to CLEAN was the one to treat as the BCD.
My new similar question is how should I do this:
I want to restore my final Full ATI backup of my (dead now) Win 8.1 system drive to a secondary HDD. (Please note that that backup image is from a non-UEFI previous PC, so it will not have an EFI partition on it.) I imagine that when I restore it it will still consider itself (er, be marked) 'active', so I must not try to boot into Windows.
What's my best strategy?
Here's the best I can come up with. Instead of trying to boot into Windows 10, what if I boot to a Hirens PE USB and go into Windows Disk Management and mark the secondary HDD (which was my dead PC's Win 8.1 boot HDD) as not active? (I've done that in WDM in Hirens before, but just in case I see that DISKPART also has an INACTIVE command.) Then can I safely boot into the right Windows (10)?
Sorry to bug you yet again, but I would hate to blow it again.
coyote wrote:My new similar question is how should I do this:
I want to restore my final Full ATI backup of my (dead now) Win 8.1 system drive to a secondary HDD. (Please note that that backup image is from a non-UEFI previous PC, so it will not have an EFI partition on it.) I imagine that when I restore it it will still consider itself (er, be marked) 'active', so I must not try to boot into Windows.
What's my best strategy?
A question first: what are you wanting to do with the Win 8.1 system backup when it is restored?
If you are only wanting to have access to various files or folders from the backup, then do a Files & Folders restore to your spare / secondary HDD.
If you have any intention of wanting to try to boot into Win 8.1 or run any programs installed with that OS, then I would recommend looking at using a virtual machine.
I use VMware Player 16 which is free for non-commercial home use, and would allow you to boot a new VM using the Acronis Rescue Media then restore the Win 8.1 backup to a virtual disk of appropriate size. VMware can allow you to create either an EFI or Legacy VM. The only issue that you may encounter is Windows activation for Win 8.1 as the VM is considered to be new hardware.
A FILES & FOLDERS RESTORE!
Perfect. I guess I didn't think of that because I've never made a Files & Folders Backup (though I've restored a lot of files and folders out of mounted Images).
I should have said that I absolutely only will copy files and folders to my new system's boot drive.
But I cherish your writing about VMware, because now that I have a PC with ample resources, I can try that out next time, say, I want to test an ATI Beta. (Though I'm disappointed to not have motivation to at the moment.)
One more thing. I'm stunned by how fast operations are on my new PC. Backups that took a couple hours now take just a couple minutes.
An image restore (from a fast HDD) that took hours now takes just a couple minutes.
But this Files & Folders Restore from a fast HDD to an M.2 SSD is surprisingly slow; it's been going for 2. 5 hours now. It's not frozen, the (absurdly meaningless, nearly the whole time it's been between 1.5 and 3 minutes) "Time left" keeps adjusting, and the status line has progressed (now it says "Preparing...").
It's about the sixth incremental on a base, but still, I can't imagine why it's taking so long. (Before running it I ran a Verify which only took 4 minutes to pass AOK. Now I'm curious whether the drive is failing, so I will run my favorite HDD hardware diagnostics on it at some point.)
I wonder what to do if this Restore doesn't even complete overnight. Install ATI2020 and Mount it (I have enough RAM to)(I was not planning to install ATI2020) . Try to restore the Base/Full backup instead?
Speaking of which, I was hoping that it was just my ancient PC or the 32-bit ATI boot media that sometimes crashed (usually in the menus). But the same thing is happening to me with ample horsepower on the 64-bit ATI2020 boot media.
That alone could lead someone to try the competition.
Edit: 4.5 hours in now; the Time Left has dipped from 95 to 77 seconds!
Files & Folders recovery can be somewhat slower depending on the number of incrementals being processed and how deeply nested the data is within the archive. If you are doing the restore from boot media then this doesn't have access to the same level of caching that is there for the application running in Windows.
Thank you very much for your reply, Steve!
Overnight the progress bar moved from about 50% to about 98%. Now 'Time left' still varies, sometimes as low as 2 seconds.
It's run for 17 hours so far, and I think I'll give it at least another 8 hours.
I think my next step would be to select specific directories instead of the entire C: drive. I don't think I need any .DLLs or anything from the Windows directory, so that's one with a lot of files I can skip.
If that doesn't work either then maybe I would try doing that from the base backup.
If that doesn't work then I cwould install ATI in Windows and try the latest Incremental there.
coyote,
Why don't you just convert your base backup into a VHDX disk file, create a VM using MS HyperV (included in Windows 10) and run the disk file in the VM. You can copy out what files you want to a separate disk and then grab them at will. This is a bit of work up front but would be a whole lot faster than 17 + hours.
OMG, I'm astonished that it just now completed successfully after 19 hours!! (Thank goodness, the last thing I want is to lose all my data.)
I don't see why everything else including other ATI boot media operations is orders of magnitude faster on my new PC than on my old one. Whereas with this, it took no less time on my new one, actually it might have taken as much as an order of magnitude longer!
I think I'm gonna run diagnostics to see if the involved drives (the HDD and the SSD) are physically AOK. (I'm curious whether the HDD file system is OK, but not curious enough to risk losing it if it's not by running CHKDSK on it! [In such a situation CHKDSK can be disastrous.])
p.s. Thanks for the interesting (and totally new to me) suggestion, Enchantech! I'll keep that option in my toolbag for future situations. All the stuff y'all do with VM has always intrigues me, it will be fun to try out VM.
In case anyone else is interested, there's nothing wrong with the disks involved. They passed physical drive diagnostics. And also passed read-only CHKDSK (which I learned is achieved on Win10 simply by omitting switches).
I have been putting off adopting virtual machines for a long time, but last week I took the plunge with VMWare, I started with VMWare Player 16 (free version), but for various reasons I eventually bit the bullet and went with VMWare Workstation Pro 16 for the added features which for me were worthwhile. For most users Player 16 (free) will be adequate. Now have virtual machines running Windows 7.1 and 8.1, as well as XP.
Ian