Backing up and Restoring Hard Drive Not Working
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A few days ago my laptop's screen broke so I bought a new one.
Now I previously replaced the hard drive for this laptop by cloning it. So when I bought this new laptop, I intended on just replacing it's hard drive with mine.
So, I backed up my hard drive from my old laptop using a hard drive enclosure, then for the new laptop,
I placed my old hard drive inside it (Because it has more space) and restored my hard drive using Rescuezilla. Upon booting the laptop, it went to automatic repair, then errored saying automatic repair didn't work.
I went into advanced options and selected load from internal HDD, and it gave an error saying invalid partition.
For some added context, the new laptop has Windows 10 Pro and a 250 GB storage drive, while my old hard drive has Windows 11 Pro and a 500 GB storage drive, which is why I wanted to replace it.
In case it's some error on my part, when I backed up my old drive hard I backed up the 4 partitions separately. namely partitions 1,2, and 4 together. and partition 3 (which is where most of the storage is located) on it's own. I then placed my old hard drive into the new laptop and restored the backups by restoring 1,2, and 4, and then immediately after I restored the 3rd partition to the drive.
Sorry for the wall of text but I wanted to give as much information as possible.
Any help or advice at all would be appreciated
If your 500GB hard drive was functional in the old laptop, after booting into the new laptop it was probably worth attempting to boot from it directly.
Because I can't see the restoration from your backup images to your functional drive adding anything, not even expanding the final partition to fill the drive (because it's the same drive)
Were these two separate backup images created at different times? If so, between Windows Updates the boot partition may have a hard linkage to your data storage partition and restoring the two separate images may be easily possible.
It may be worth verifying both your backup images, then restoring your partition 1/2/4 image again. Then when you restore partition 3 try not keeping 'overwrite partition table' ticked but map the partition using the rightmost column. I don't think it will change the behavior though.
If you have any backup image containing the full 1/2/3/4 partitions, it's probably worth restoring that to the disk and booting it as a test.
For both images, it may be helpeful to upload the
clonezilla-imglog files (or it email rescuezilla at gmail) and I'll take a look.Right now I suspect there's a hard linkage that taking the backup images at different times may be the root cause of this issue.
I deleted the 3rd partition image (To free up space on the USB) and am now backing up the image, making sure to include all four of the partitions.
Will this work? or should I stop the backup and send images for partitions 1,2, and 4.
Forgot to include that I backed up the 1st, 2nd, and 4th partition and afterwards I backed up the 3rd partition image and It took over 12 hours to complete. I don't know if that counts as being created at different times.
If you're creating a backup of a drive that's already not booting that certainly will not help.
That 3rd partition image was important, deleting your only backup copy from your USB isn't ideal.
If you didn't boot back into Windows between the creating the backup images then I would expect the backup images should be good. It's possible to use the 'Verify' function on each image and sanity check it works.
You should be able to restore each of your two images independently, but if Windows did a Windows Update etc between reboots, then you may need to rebuilding the Windows BCD (Boot Configuration Data) from the Windows installation media after restoring the images. This is a relatively involved process that requires following a YouTube tutorial, but it should be possible.