Inaccessible Boot Device (Bluescreen boot loop)

mr_zen256

2[H]4U
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Dec 29, 2005
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Stuck with a bit of a dilemma here. I was cloning a hard drive when all of a sudden the PC restarted itself and got stuck in a boot loop. Trying to access recovery options doesn't work, just goes to blue screen. Haven't had much success with USB recovery either. I was able to boot into a USB Win PE to run some diagnostics and things are not looking promising. When accessing disk manager, it will often hang. I can't run sfc /SCANNOW or CHKDSK.. It just hangs there. I suspect the drive is toast and might need to take it to a data recovery center.

Any ideas before I throw my hat in?

EDIT: Not looking good...

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What program were you cloning with? When “most” software clones a drive it will lock a partition and image it, then clone it. Generally speaking the original drive is locked and only being read during the clone. So it’s safe.

What was the software, and reason for the clone? We’re uou suspecting this original drive was bad to begin with?
 
What program were you cloning with? When “most” software clones a drive it will lock a partition and image it, then clone it. Generally speaking the original drive is locked and only being read during the clone. So it’s safe.

What was the software, and reason for the clone? We’re uou suspecting this original drive was bad to begin with?

I was cloning with AOMEI Backupper for transfer to a new device. I heard their software works pretty good even when transferring to devices with different hardware. Never got that far though.
 
If you messed up the source and target, you overwrote your OS drive and it's now corrupt beyond repair.
 
If you messed up the source and target, you overwrote your OS drive and it's now corrupt beyond repair.

That wasn't the case in this scenario, but the drive is definitely beyond repair. I managed to load up Windows portable on a USB and salvaged the data using Hetman data recovery software. The data transfer even failed a couple of times before I managed to get it all, but it's all sorted now. That was a nightmare!

Next move will be to wipe all partitions and reformat. I'm interested to see if there is a physical issue going on. Thanks for all those who offered their feedback 👍
 
Quick update on this one. Pretty sure the drive suffered a hardware failure during the cloning process. After managing to thankfully salvage the data, attempting to format the drive is seemingly impossible.

Attempting to delete the partitions and format the drive in Windows disk management results in the utility freezing. Even using DISKPART through Powershell fails. Have attempted using several 3rd party partition managers and most simply return I/O errors when trying to delete the partitions.

One last trick to try is wiping the drive using a data wipe. Not the most SSD friendly of methods, but it's a last resort before writing off the drive completely. Even if that works, it's probably safer to simply buy a new replacement drive.
 
Spinrite does work in SSD's but you need to change the BIOS setting to a standard IDE and use option 2 only.
 
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