Has anyone done this before? And was it successful? (Windows 10/Partitions)

JarJarBinks

JarJarBinks

Limp Gawd
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Jan 13, 2008
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I'm not sure if this belongs in operating systems or storage devices but oh well.

So here is my problem and here is what I want to do:

I had a hard drive in a laptop experience a fall and damage some sectors and now windows 10 won't boot.
I took the drive out and did a scan on it and it seems most of the bad sectors are near the beginning of the disk.

I tried cloning the entire drive to a new drive but windows won't boot, I did SFC /scannow to the new cloned drive, Check Disk, and a virus scan before putting in back into the laptop. But no improvement.

What I want to try is this:

These are the standard windows 10 partitions:

Recovery/System Partition
EFI Partition
Reserved Partition
Data Partition

I want to do a fresh install so I get brand new partitions (because I think that is where the damage is), but then I want to clone just the Data partition from the old drive to this new drive with the fresh install.

Has anyone done it, did it work for you, do you suggest giving it a try?

Thanks for all your help.
 
It all depends on exactly why Windows won't boot that could be the root of the problem. Can you do what you're hoping to do? Of course, but if the actual bad sectors happen to be located in various places on the Data partition (which I believe is your system partition) then that could be the where the problems actually are and you could be losing important data in the process as even a few bytes that are corrupt could make an entire file unreadable and lost. The clue that it's a Windows-related issue meaning files on the system partition are damaged would be that a cloned operation resulted in the same non-boot configuration. Yes it's possible that the boot files themselves could be mucked up, you didn't specifically say what the error is, you just said "windows 10 won't boot."

Based on what you said here's what my own solution would be:

- stop using that drive as an operating system drive ASAP, it should only be treated a source of data at this point for cloning/restoration to another target drive

- do not do any more checks on that drive, no more SFC passes (which can overwrite data if a file is found to be corrupt) and no more chkdsk passes (which overwrites data if it creates .chk files with what it considers to be recovered data) - those kinds of tools can do more harm than good at this particular moment

- back up whatever data you have on the Data or system partition on that drive in question to a safe location aka a drive with no current errors or problems, and I mean attempt to do a straight file copy, nothing funky, not using data recovery software of any kind since it's already there, the User folders, etc not focusing on the applications/programs that are installed

- do the clean install of Windows 10 on the new hard drive or SSD you're planning to use then move your data back to the same locations after you reinstall the applications/programs

By default almost every useful piece of data related to applications/programs resides in the User directory and subfolders with the specific users as expected, there can be some data in the App Data folder inside each of those as well - the applications/programs themselves should be easy to reinstall.

Yes I realize you're coming at this from the typical perspective of "I don't want to start all over again reinstalling all those applications and programs and then restoring all the data/personal files and whatever..." and that might actually work but in this particular situation I'm not certain that's going to be a workable solution. You can, of course, do exactly what you yourself suggested as your method and in the process if it fails then you still have that original drive to fall back on - that's the key here, you have to be careful with that damaged drive and not write anything to it but as long as it's functional (for now) and can be used as the source for the data then that's a good thing.

Bad sectors aren't really a big hassle most of the time, it's the other actual mechanical problems where a drive will physically fail and not even be recognized as plugged in and working when you really have a problem. But that's what I'd do myself, as I outlined in those steps above.

Good luck...
 
Thanks for your thoughts and to be clear, I used the SFC and all those other tools on the new drive after the data was cloned to try to repair any system files. I don't really care about starting over it's someone else laptop I am just trying to help them keep as much of their data as possible. I thought it might be fun exercise just to try and see if it worked but the drive is so large it takes hours to keep trying these different cloning ideas.
 
Well when you use SFC what happens is that it checks the system files (duh) against their digital signatures/hashes and if an instance of corruption is detected then SFC will go into the Windows file store (WinSxS) and locate the system file, extract it and decompress it, then delete the corrupt version (which means it's deleted from the Master File Table aka MFT but is not deleted from the actual drive space) - that space gets marked as not being used by the file system at that moment - and then it writes the non-corrupt version back to the drive. There's a better than normal chance that when it writes the non-corrupt version back to the drive it's not going to put it in exactly the same place the original corrupt one was located hence it's overwriting other data someplace else on the drive.

If there are no corrupt files found then the entire process is one big read operation so not a big concern, but chkdsk doesn't do file integrity checks like SFC does, it just looks for data that's not matching a simplistic CRC and if it fails then it copies the data out to another location (the .chk files) and those can get written all over the place like anything else which again doesn't help the situation but can make it dramatically worse if you use the /f option to do the fixing which chkdsk really isn't all that great at to be honest. If you didn't use that /f option then again it's a pure read operation so nothing should be harmed in the process.

It can't hurt at this point (not that I can imagine) to do what you were hoping to do but there's no guarantee the results are going to be promising. Also note that SFC doesn't necessarily check all the files on a particular system - it primarily checks files necessary for Windows to actually run, not necessarily the files Windows needs to boot aka stuff that could be related to the EFI/UEFI process and other aspects.

And yes, that's the downside of large drives nowadays and still why I and many other people simply won't use large system partitions. Regardless of how much space I've got, my system partition is never over 80GB in size, it's just not worth the hassles to me if things go wrong. I do images several times a week of my system partition and it takes like 2-3 minutes at most and maybe 3-4 to do a restore if needed. All the other "data" goes on a secondary partition aka Storage.

I know most consumers would never go to such lengths so when they get laptops or even desktops with huge 1TB+ hard drives in them having all that stuff on one big ass partition is more trouble than it's worth if the drive develops issues.

Hope it all works out.
 
Yea I got you. I do the same thing for my systems. All the data copied successfully on the data partition so I wasn't worried about any data being overwritten that I may need to recover, the only concern was trying to get windows to boot successfully to save me some work (not much) but mostly to impress the person I am trying to help. It isn't like it was something I was counting on I just thought it might be an experience I could learn something from but if I was going to expend so much time I wanted to know if there was even a possibility of it working or are those other partitions linked in such a way it would absolutely not work assuming the data partition was in good working order.
 
That didn't even cross my mind because of the circumstances, I should of tried that on the new cloned drive.
 
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