OS migration failed and now the old drive won't boot

[John Scott]

Using this video as a guide, I was going through the steps to migrate my OS and data from my HD to a new SSD and ran into what I thought was a minor snag. Shortly after the HD began cloning to the SSD I got an error message indicating that the windows install wasn't able to mount to the new drive, saying something about hibernation mode (even though I shut down completely using command prompt, per the instructions). The remainder of the drive copied but I figured I'd just format it and try again.

After it finished, I tried to boot into the existing install of windows on my old HD and my PC immediately entered auto repair. A message displayed saying it was attempting to repair disc errors, and then I got a blue screen saying it was unable to repair.

I currently can't boot into anything besides the flash drive with rescuezilla. Seems like I might be screwed. Is my only option a fresh install of windows?

[Rescuezilla]

Hi John,

Rescuezilla's clone (or image restore) does not modify the source disk.

I suspect what's happening here is while you may be booting on your old HD the Windows bootloader on that drive may be getting confused when it's trying to boot with the presence of the failed/partial SSD clone (which failed due the hibernate issue as you mentioned, see below).

If what I suspect happened is correct then one solution is to shutdown your system, disconnect power and physically disconnect the SSD temporarily. Then you should be able to boot back into your main HD without issue. An alternative strategy would be to erase the SSD with the failed/partial clone and then Windows bootloader on your old HD should no longer get confused.

On the hibernation issue: I have had success using the start menu's 'Restart' command to avoid Windows putting the NTFS filesystem into hibernation mode, but in the most extreme case some users have reported needing to temporarily completely disable hibernation entirely (with a specific powercfg command in an Administrator Command Prompt) in order to entirely temporarily (don't forget to re-enable it) in order to boot into Rescuezill and do a backup or a clone.

[John Scott]

I already tried disabling the SSD in bios, but I will see what happens when I physically remove it. Thanks!

[John Scott]

Oh hold up, on second thought I'm rralizing that if I remove the SSD that doesn't really soove my issue. I need to wipe it so I can attempt to clone it agin, and I won't be able to so that if I remove it. Is there a way to wipe tye SSD from the rescuezilla OS?

[Rescuezilla]

Is there a way to wipe tye SSD from the rescuezilla OS?

Yes, the easiest way is to use GParted Partition Editor from Rescuezilla itself, and (after validating the correct drive is selected with the top-right hand side dropdown menu) you can format the drive simply by selecting the 'Create new Partition Table' item from the menu followed by creating eg, a single blank filesystem and applying the queued operations.

Certainly if your machine does not have an easily disconnectable SSD then this is probably the easiest solution.

Let me know how it goes.

I already tried disabling the SSD in bios,

I'm interested to know the specification of your system. If the operation that you did is equivalent to disconnecting the SSD then it's a bit worrying. But I can imagine the setting may only be disabling the drive in the BIOS context but it might still be able to be accessed from the perspective of the operating system (whether Windows or Rescuezilla)

[Anonymous]

Thanks for taking time to respond on Christmas Eve!

I just finished wiping the SSD, and now when I attempt to boot the HD it goes to a blue recovery screen. I have the option to try again, enter Recovery Settings, Startup Settings, or bios. Bios is the only option that does anything, all others bring me back to the recovery screen.

I'll go ahead and remove the SSD now and see if anything changes.

I'm running an asus x570-plus with a ryzen 7 2700x.

[Anonymous]

Ok, the SSD has been removed and I'm still getting the recovery screen. I'll have to make a new Windows install media, because I wiped my old one to make the rescuezilla media lol. But I'm too tired for that right now, and I'm not sure if I'll get around to it until after Christmas.

In the meantime if you have any other insight re: my system specs I'd be happy to hear what you think!

[John Scott]

Alright, back from Christmas chaos. I attempted to repair my windows 11 install with an install media, but it was unsuccessful. i received two error messages.

The first error says "System restore could not find the offline boot volume. Please ensure it is currently accessible. I double-checked to make sure the HD is properly mounted, and it appears to be.

The second error says There was an unexpected error. The oarameter is incorrect (0x80070057). Please close System Restore and try again.

Google says this error code corresponds with a number of storage issues. I'm going to try to adjust the partitions using rescuezilla, but if that fails I might just throw in the towel with that HD and start with a clean install on my new SSD.

[Rescuezilla]

I'll try to reproduce the circumstances of this later tonight in a VM: specifically a working Windows 11 environment and a second drive that contains failed clone due to the (very common) situation where the NTFS partition is still in a hibernated state so partclone can't access it causing the clone to fail -- followed by trying to boot from the first drive back into Windows but having this isue.

[Rescuezilla]

I did some testing in a VirtualBox virtual machine environment tonight, and Rescuezilla worked fine and I haven’t been able to reproduce the issue you experienced yet.

I tested using Rescuezilla v2.4.2 (Jammy variant) in two separate environments to clone some existing Windows 10 environments I had on hand:

• Windows 10 EFI system (GPT partition table)
• Windows 10 BIOS system (legacy MBR partition table)

I booted into each machine, and used the Windows' Start Menu to shut them down, then I booted the machine into Rescuezilla and cloned the OS to an empty disk of identical size. This succeeded without any issue (notably I didn’t see the hibernation error).

Then, on each machine I tried booting with both the original and cloned disks still attached. As mentioned above, this is not something I recommend or often do because there's a few places in both the operating system bootloader and post operating system boot-up where things can get confused with multiple disks with duplicate identifiers. But it booted into Windows fine. So I created a temporary file on desktop, shutdown Windows and detached the original HD. Then booted the machine again and the temp file was no longer present (indicating I booted the cloned drive). Again, this worked for both the EFI and BIOS Windows installs.

I’m a bit skeptical of my test because the clone succeeded without a hibernation error (I checked the Windows Registry and HibernateEnabledDefault was 1, but it’s still possible I’ve disabled hibernation on these disks.

Given the severity of your situation, tomorrow I will try and create two fresh OS installed (this time, Windows 11) and try to again reproduce your issue.

Just out of curiosity is your SSD an NVMe SSD?

[John Scott]

Yes, it's a t-force cardea z540.

[Rescuezilla]

Quick question: if you make a fresh Windows 11 install on that destination NVMe drive can you access files on your original HD?

[John Scott]

As a matter of fact, I did just that last night. With a fresh install on the NVMe, the old HD is accessible. However I removed it from the PC after copying everything I need, as I also have a new portable SSD that I'll be using for storage.

[Rescuezilla]

Oh that's excellent you're up and running.

But yeah, super unfortunate your experience with Rescuezilla here both the inconvenience around the failed clone to the hibernation issue, but far more importantly the weird issue rebooting your source disk.

From my perspective my steps are:

1. Keep trying to develop a reproducible failure case for this
2. Determine the root cause (my theory is still the Windows bootloader's auto repair put itself into a relatively persistent bad state when booted with original source filesystem and a specific failed clone one present)
3. Identify preventative solutions for Rescuezilla frontend (improving the warning messages about the dangers of booting with cloned disks present certainly seems reasonable)
4. Identify a series of steps on how to resolve such a situation since Windows bootloader autorepair failed (eg, boot from Windows boot media, go to command-line and run a series of steps manually)

Since you're able to access all the files on your source disk means that there should have been a way to make Windows bootloader successfully boot from it again

Sorry again for your experience here!

[John Scott]

No worries, thanks again for all your help! Everything worked out ok on my end, but hopefully you were able to get something valuable from the situation.

Take care.

[Anonymous]

Has any further progress on this problem been made?
I have experienced this same problem and am now stuck.
I have a dell precision M7540, it has 2 NVME drives, of 2 terabytes capacity each.
I have one drive with my full windows install, and the second drive serves as a file backup only(no program files, just documents, pictures, videos)

I replaced the file backup drive with a 4 terabyte NVME drive, to which I wanted to clone my windows installation.
I used rescuezilla to clone the installation from the 2 TB drive to the 4TB drive. I got an error abot windows failing to mount dueto hibernating.
I made the mistake of proceeding with the clone anyway expecting to be able to reboot my old harddrive and look up some solutions to the problem.
When I put both 2 terabyte drives back into the machine as it was configured originally, it went into the windows boot repair screen, and failed to repair the startup sequence.

I do not know how to proceed from here.
I am posting this from another computer elsewhere.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

[Rescuezilla]

(EDIT: reposting this as accidentally posted without being logged in so was anonymous)

Unfortunately I don't have solution right now.

Issue #466 is clearly a critical severity issue. A small number of users with Windows environments have experienced ths. And after many, many hours of trying I still haven't been able to reproduce it, or found a fix for a user who experienced this issue.

EDIT: a poster below was able to rebuild the BCD with a Windows installation disk, but such instructions weren't able to recover a previous user who experienced this error.

[Anonymous]

Came here to comment that I had a similar issue. I was cloning a drive and experienced an error. Like issue #466, afterwards I found neither the source nor target drive would boot! Fortunately was able to repair the boot sector on the source drive with Chkdsk. No luck with target drive. Now I'm afraid to use Rescuezilla at all.

---

[Anonymous]

PS the error I got while trying to clone was "error restoring partition." Which seemed odd because I was trying to clone the drive not restore something.

[Anonymous]

I tried the solution posted here on this video,
and it did not correct my issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHGsI3CUlgs

[Anonymous]

I am the poster above. Correction. the above video solution did work. it just required two restarts after completing the suggested CMD operations from a live booted flashdrive of ventoy 1.0.99 running the latest windows 10 64 bit ISO image 22H2.

I copied the windows ISO to the storage partition on a 64 GB sandisk cruzer USB, that had ventoy 1.0.99 flashed to it.
I plugged in the USB and booted the windows iso via wimboot from the ventoy menu.
I then followed the instructions in the video exactly. Here is the link to the video below once again.
I rebooted twice. My problem was resolved. What a relief.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHGsI3CUlgs

[Rescuezilla]

Rescuezilla v2.5.1 has now been released: https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/releases/latest

It has removed the only known modification of the source disk that Rescuezilla makes backup and clone operations: the usage of ntfsfix --clear-dirty described above. From the Rescuezilla v2.5.1 changelog:

• Stops running the ntfsfix --clear-dirty on NTFS filesystems on the SOURCE DISK during backup and clone operations (#466)
• Running this command (the only command in Rescuezilla that modifies the source disk) appears to be the root cause of a critical severity error that impacted a small number of (hibernated) Windows disks since the command was added in Rescuezilla v2.3 (2021-12-24) where creating a backup image or clone appears to cause some kind of corruption that can break the Windows boot with a Blue Screen of Death, possibly due to corruption in the Windows BCD (Boot Configuration Data)
• However, I still have not been able to reproduce the error in despite many hours of testing
• Removing this command will likely mean more 'hibernated NTFS disk' errors on backup or clone of Windows disks if not booting into Rescuezilla with the 'Restart' Start Menu command -- but removing the apparently dangerous command is obviously worthwhile

[...]

As noted in the changelog, I haven't been able to reproduce the issue despite many hours of testing.

The source disk is no longer modified by the ntfsfix --clear-dirty during backup and clone operations, which appears to be the only possible root cause.