Tale Of Woe Part II.

[OldGuy]

WinXP Pro on laptop.
Laptop has HDD that is starting to fail per Acronis Drive Monitor.
Got a new WD Blue SATA 500G. Tried to clone but it failed and totally
died.
After that it did not show up in any clone software and it clicked.
Took back for refund.
Bought a WD Black SATA 500G HDD.
Using a VANTEC SATA 6G USB3 adapter to do clone.
Ran AOMEI to clone. Took 8 hours.
Installed WD Black 500G.
Laptop starts up but goes no place.
BIOS correctly shows the new HDD as the boot drive (top of list).

Before with the bad drive (not the failing drive) I got a message that
it could not find the OS.
Now nothing. No messages at all. I turn on BIOS Boot Diagnostic and it
sees the HDD then the mouse but no error messages.
The disk drive LED does not flash.
I exchanged the drives: failing back in and new WD Black to Vantec.
I plugged the cloned drive via VANTEC (USB plug into the laptop)and the
laptop bing-bonged and there it was in Windows Explorer. Looks like it
is a good copy at least for what I can see. Folders and files seem
present.
So maybe there is a boot sector problem with the bad drive that when
cloned did not give a good boot to the cloned drive???

I used AOMEI since it was the easiest for me to figure out how to
clone.

Anyway, suggestions please.

(Back-story: I successfully installed the WD Blue 500G drive from the
failing drive but after three months the WD Blue just dropped dead.
That was not a clone but a total rebuild. Id o not want to do that
again! Days of work.)

 

[OldGuy]

Forgot to say that I have successfully used the VANTEC adapter to clone
a SATA HHD to SSD. The SSD booted just fine and I am using that laptop
right now.

 

[Paul]

WinXP Pro on laptop.
Laptop has HDD that is starting to fail per Acronis Drive Monitor.
Got a new WD Blue SATA 500G. Tried to clone but it failed and totally died.
After that it did not show up in any clone software and it clicked.
Took back for refund.
Bought a WD Black SATA 500G HDD.
Using a VANTEC SATA 6G USB3 adapter to do clone.
Ran AOMEI to clone. Took 8 hours.
Installed WD Black 500G.
Laptop starts up but goes no place.
BIOS correctly shows the new HDD as the boot drive (top of list).

Before with the bad drive (not the failing drive) I got a message that
it could not find the OS.
Now nothing. No messages at all. I turn on BIOS Boot Diagnostic and it
sees the HDD then the mouse but no error messages.
The disk drive LED does not flash.
I exchanged the drives: failing back in and new WD Black to Vantec.
I plugged the cloned drive via VANTEC (USB plug into the laptop)and the
laptop bing-bonged and there it was in Windows Explorer. Looks like it
is a good copy at least for what I can see. Folders and files seem
present.
So maybe there is a boot sector problem with the bad drive that when
cloned did not give a good boot to the cloned drive???

I used AOMEI since it was the easiest for me to figure out how to clone.

Anyway, suggestions please.

(Back-story: I successfully installed the WD Blue 500G drive from the
failing drive but after three months the WD Blue just dropped dead.
That was not a clone but a total rebuild. Id o not want to do that
again! Days of work.)

So you know about fixboot and fixmbr ?

None of this makes any sense. As the process of successfully cloning,
would require copying the partition table from the old MBR. And if you
copy those 64 bytes from sector 0 of the old drive, you would be just
as likely to copy the rest of the MBR sector as well (a 512 byte copy).

So I don't really see fixmbr as being necessary. It probably
has a good MBR.

And fixboot, adds boot code to the file system header of C:. Imagine
the C: partition has ~64 sectors up front, followed by the file
system proper. In there somewhere, is more boot code. The only
way to lose that boot code, is to format a partition. I'm not
aware of any programs doing a clone, by selectively ignoring
the file system header. It should get copied too.

So none of those kind of repairs make any sense, immediately
after a clone. It would take "careful meddling", to need those
two utilities in recovery console.

*******

You should give us some useful symptoms such as:

"I have a black screen, with a blinking underline cursor
in the upper left hand corner"

There would be several common screen appearances on boot
failures. And the black screen with the blinking cursor in
the upper right is one of them.

Paul

 

[Paul]

WinXP Pro on laptop.
Laptop has HDD that is starting to fail per Acronis Drive Monitor.
Got a new WD Blue SATA 500G. Tried to clone but it failed and totally died.
After that it did not show up in any clone software and it clicked.
Took back for refund.
Bought a WD Black SATA 500G HDD.
Using a VANTEC SATA 6G USB3 adapter to do clone.
Ran AOMEI to clone. Took 8 hours.
Installed WD Black 500G.
Laptop starts up but goes no place.
BIOS correctly shows the new HDD as the boot drive (top of list).

Before with the bad drive (not the failing drive) I got a message that
it could not find the OS.
Now nothing. No messages at all. I turn on BIOS Boot Diagnostic and it
sees the HDD then the mouse but no error messages.
The disk drive LED does not flash.
I exchanged the drives: failing back in and new WD Black to Vantec.
I plugged the cloned drive via VANTEC (USB plug into the laptop)and the
laptop bing-bonged and there it was in Windows Explorer. Looks like it
is a good copy at least for what I can see. Folders and files seem
present.
So maybe there is a boot sector problem with the bad drive that when
cloned did not give a good boot to the cloned drive???

I used AOMEI since it was the easiest for me to figure out how to clone.

Anyway, suggestions please.

(Back-story: I successfully installed the WD Blue 500G drive from the
failing drive but after three months the WD Blue just dropped dead.
That was not a clone but a total rebuild. Id o not want to do that
again! Days of work.)

You also have the option of doing a Repair Install, which keeps
your applications. When I did one of those, 99% of things behaved
normally. There were a couple of things that seemed to get reset
by the Repair Install, so in terms of "all my settings" getting
saved, you may observe tiny differences.

Unlike the latest OSes, a Repair Install is done by booting the
install CD and installing from there (which means Repair Install
is infinitely more useful). In the case of WinXP, you
may have installed IE7 or IE8, and the instructions are normally
to remove those before doing Repair Install (which in most
cases, would be impossible). To fix that, the solution seems to be,
to reinstall the same version of IE that you'd upgraded to before,
to return things to a working state. (Repair install OS, reinstall IE8
or whatever.) Remember that, some of the things in Windows, rely on
iehtml engine (the browser engine) to render things on the screen.
And if you manage to break IE, those things can stop working. Like,
when I did a Repair Install, I couldn't activate. And it was some
kind of security setting on IE that seemed to be stopping some script.
But I didn't want to blow all that stuff away, and I had no way of
remembering exactly what I'd modified in there. Installing IE8 and
removing it again later, was enough to complete activation and move
on with life.

I have no advice to offer, on "comparing" two disk drives for equality.
While I have various tools for listing every file, and I could then
"diff" the two listings to detect differences, that wouldn't tell
me anything about file system headers, the MBR, and so on. Instead,
I prefer to use tools with known characteristics (i.e. tools I've
cloned successfully with in the past, rather than testing a new one
with a broken disk). Maybe Aomei is a good cloner, and maybe it isn't,
and since that one doesn't get mentioned all that often, I can't
say whether it's good or not. We would need to know whether it "chucks"
files with read errors in them, to know what it's done in this case.
And since you ran CHKDSK, somewhere along the way on this adventure,
just about anything is possible now. (CHKDSK can easily remove files
and put them in lost and found. Check under C: and see if anything
was recovered there. Any of the files I've seen in there, were
just fragments, and totally useless to me.)

Paul