Why did my cloning catastrophically fail?
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
Brought to you by:
steven_shiau
Menu
▾
▴
Today I cloned & swapped a 500gb NVME for a 2TB NVME. I used an external enclosure for the new 2tb drive and I followed the Clonezilla live drive-to-drive guide. First time using the software, I'm a win10 user in the US.
When I first cloned, swapped, & booted on the new drive everything was working great, so I put my old 500gb hdd in the external enclosure and erased it for future use. Big mistake. Later I realized that the partitions were wrong on the new 2TB drive, since it showed a capacity of 500gb. I did not understand the instructions in the guide regarding the "k0" "k1" partition business and it said just to hit k0 if you didn't know how to proceed. That turned out to be a huge mistake & it partitioned my 2tb drive to 500gb.
I sat beyond frustrated with myself and googled some options. I couldn't "extend" the C: primary partition and I assumed my only option was to re-clone my 500gb HDD from my 2tb HDD. I figured since the total partition size was ~400gb it should be fine. I was wrong.
Upon cloning the drive it kicked up an error, something like "NVME sgp3 could not be found/cloned ERROR hit CONTINUE". I hit continue, and it simply finished like nothing was wrong afterall, so I assumed it was the ~1.3TB of unallocated space on the NVME drive. I unplugged my 500gb in the enclosure and plugged it into my laptop to check it on disk manager, just to make sure everything looked ok with the clone, and it did. So I cloned my 500gb back onto the 2TB drive but this time I hit "k1 porportional partition".
Cloning finishes. I unplug 500gb hdd enclosure & attempt 1st boot. MOBO splash screen imeediately reads "attempting repair" and eventually finishes with a blue screen "startup repair failed". It won't boot.
Looking at the drive using a win10 installer USB/disk manager, I see the following screenshot. Worse yet, the partitions on my 500gb original drive seem messed up. I can't get either drive to boot at all, and I fear I've lost my C: drive and my plex server. Any help, please?
Here's a follow up screenshot with a list of volumes. The 2tb HDD in question should be disk 6, volume 7,8,9, also I notice C: drive was allocated to a storage drive with nothing but movies on it.
I solved my own problem, and will post it in case anyone else encounters this unfortunate boot error.
What happened: My partitions cloned incorrectly likely due to a windows 10 flaw. When flashing NVME drives whilst having other drives types connected simultaneously, according to my searches, a win10 install or clone may partially flash on unintended drives. When cloning the drive, it put 15mb portions of the boot partition on 7 different drives. That's why my image failed, and why I couldn't boot.
TLDR: you should probably unplug your extra drives before cloning/imaging
Thanks for sharing that.
Steven