Kept getting the blue screen of death, Dell diagnostics said I need a new hard drive. Thought I’d take the opportunity to try a SSD.

Samsung SSD plugged in as an external drive. Migration software on, gets to 99%, 8 seconds to go, and the thing crashes, blue screen of death.

I tried, just for the sake of it, replacing the old HD with the new SSD and I got a prompt screen saying “No Operating System detected”

Swapped the original back in, started up, started the Samsung migration software, got to 99% again, same deal as before: crash to blue screen.

I asked mate who didn’t have time to talk properly (in the middle of putting kids to bed – sorry Tom!); he said it sounded like the master boot record was corrupted on the original hard disk.

No original media, Windows 7 came pre-installed – otherwise I would have gone for a clean install on the SSD – got all docs and media on backup HD.

Any ideas on how to get the last 1% done?

You should still have a Win 7 recovery disk? (If not then acquire one)

You can use that to boot to command prompt and fix the master boot record with the incantation bootrec.exe /FixMbr

Or if that doesn’t work you can write a new one instead.

See http://www.tomshardware.com/news/win7-windows-7-mbr,10036.html

being a linux fanboi now I might be asking something stupid, but does format /mbr still work?

If you need an install solution see this thread:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/help-with-laptop-windows

Your mate shouldn’t give up his day job. He’s regurgitating some words he heard once in order to sound clever.

You’re trying to clone a broken hard disk; that’s optimistic at best. Worth a punt but if it was going to work reliably then you wouldn’t be replacing the disk in the first place.

Get a copy of the Windows 7 edition you have and install it to the new disk using the OEM key on the sticker.

Cheers all,

Thanks for the links, looks like I’ll be putting my energies into a clean install. So frustrating for the thing to fall over with 8 seconds to go after two hours, though! The MS OEM sticker is worn and the code illegible, which doesn’t help, but it seems like there are options.

Cougar, agreed, it was optimistic, only replacing ‘cos of a problem, but worth a punt with the cloning software. Not sure why you needed to stick in the chippy dig at my mate, though. He was trying to help with his best guess while he was busy with the kids. Freely admitted he didn’t really know, as he’s not worked on Windows for years. Thanks anyway for the link.

Re the failed image: make sure the system partition is “active” or “bootable” on the new disk, post clone. If the clone software failed at the last hurdle, it may not have set the partition as active.
You can do this using gparted, (google gparted live cd).
You will need another system to create the cd or USB tho.

Try under the battery too for the license.

@ned – you are actually in quite good shape. Just need a fresh OS install and looks like all your data is recoverable/accessible. Take this opportunity to make a good backup of all your data assuming you haven’t already.

Thanks Baron, I will look up gparted. Annoyingly, the drive won’t show up in explorer – I get the “bu-dum – you’ve plugged something in” tone, but visible drive.

I might have better luck in wife’s Win 8 machine, as it’s seen things mine hasn’t in the past.

Cheers mol, will look.

Thanks jambalaya – all backed up! 🙂

it seems like there are options.

There are tools you can run to extract the key. I used to use a thing called Jellybean, though I don’t know offhand whether it supports W7 or not.

Not sure why you needed to stick in the chippy criticism

Because I grow oh so very weary of “experts” making problems worse, and I have a chip on my shoulder about it. Why make stuff up when by his own admission he doesn’t know? “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable response.

being a linux fanboi now I might be asking something stupid, but does format /mbr still work?

You’re thinking of fdisk /mbr and no, not since Vista. The command GrahamS suggested supersedes it.

Annoyingly, the drive won’t show up in explorer

>.< You said you were getting BSoD crashes, are you saying now that it doesn’t boot at all?

Cougar, it boots fine on the existing HDD, but the new SSD I’ve been trying to clone to, won’t show up when plugged in as an external drive, so I don’t know how I’ll get on working on it with gparted. I’ve got another laptop I can try, though.

And it was an “I don’t know, but…” which I then brought here with a question mark. I can see how what you mentioned would get frustrating though.

Ah, I see. Yes, it won’t appear as a drive in Explorer if the cloning process fails; it should still appear in Disk Manager though (right-click Computer and choose Manage). You may even be able to set is as active and assign a drive letter from there, depending on how far through the process it got. No drive letter = no Explorer view, doesn’t mean nothing else can see it.

I wonder if it’s the act of creating the boot sector which is crashing it. You may have some sort of protection in place (either in the BIOS or from your anti-virus) to prevent boot sector writes, and the clone s/w isn’t dealing with that gracefully. If that’s the case then Disk Manager could well fix it, but you’ll still need to work out what’s preventing that write first.

Can I chip on with a suggestion that can’t hurt IMO & takes a step back… try running a chkdsk on the existing HDD before cloning? Especially if windows is crashing, errors in the data on the disc ‘might’ cause issues for the cloning software
How to run it, be-aware it’ll want to reboot when you select the “Automatically fix file system errors” and run on startup & will probably take an hour or so to run through.

Cool, some more things to go at, thanks.

doesn’t mean nothing else can see it.

The Samsung s/w can see it, knows how much data is on there, so I’m sure it won’t be too hard to get at.

but you’ll still need to work out what’s preventing that write first.

That would be ideal! It’s so close to complete, it’s tempting to believe there should be something easy and insubstantial that needs tickling to finish the job.

I’ll see what I can see/do with Disk Manager tonight.

Cheers again!

Thanks z1ppy, hadn’t seen yours before.

Sounds like it’s worth a try.

I would try some alternative cloning software

I use DD running from a ubuntu live cd

This command creates an exact copy of the drive so the new drive
needs to be bigger than the old drive

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd bs=8M

Warning ! if you get the drives the wrong way around you will wipe your data

use disk utility to identify your hdd and ssd id’s as they may be different than above, the hdd id replaces sda and the ssd id replaces sdd

If in doubt ask someone to check before pressing go

If you’re going to take the Linux route, Gparted will do all that with a nice user-friendly GUI.

One thing to watch out for with cloning using third-party tools, you might end up with a partition which would be perfectly fine for a mechanical drive but badly aligned for SSD, and performance will suffer badly as a result. The Windows 7 installer is aware of this, and the software supplied with the drive will be of course, but other partitioning tools may not be.

There are tools you can run to extract the key. I used to use a thing called Jellybean, though I don’t know offhand whether it supports W7 or not.

“Magic Jellybean” Good software just be careful with the added crap, you have an opportunity to uncheck it pre-install. The trouble with this though is that it’s probably a factory image, and the key won’t be the same as the one on the underside of the laptop, and won’t work with OEM media.

That’s a good point actually. I can’t actually remember ever having to do an OEM W7 reinstall without the key; all the ones I’ve done have been either using a retail disk, a ‘factory reset’ recovery or a corporate image.

OEM activation is tied to a fingerprint in BIOS with W7. You should be able to create your own installation media from within Windows if it was preinstalled and you didn’t get discs with it. From there, I’d hazard that a phone call to MS would sort you out as far as activation goes.

Another possible why it’s not showing in explorer is that bios hdd security is enable I.e. A hdd password has been entered. If you’ve owned the machine from new then you would know if this is the case, if not, the setting should be fairly apparent in the bios – prob. under “security”.

What code does the BSOD report ?

Also, the original hdd may have a recovery partition on it, which is likely to be hidden. The cloning software may be having issues with this…

If you can get to grips with any cloning software, attempt to clone ONLY the SYSTEM partition, not the entire disk.

Be really careful with these tools as sometimes, with the best of intent, they offer to fix problems and end up making things a lot worse (chkdsk is also in this camp).

Unless you have proof it is defo the hdd, maybe run a ram checker as I’ve had a number of machines suffer “random” BSODs from failing ram. Google “memtest ultimate boot disk” –

bios hdd security is enable I.e. A hdd password has been entered.

Had it from new, don’t remember doing this. Don’t have a Windows password, so doubt I did anything any more advanced!

What code does the BSOD report ?

KERNEL _DATA_INPAGE_ERROR … STOP: 0x0000007a

Also, the original hdd may have a recovery partition on it, which is likely to be hidden. The cloning software may be having issues with this…

Any way of finding out more about a hidden recovery partition?

If you can get to grips with any cloning software, attempt to clone ONLY the SYSTEM partition, not the entire disk.

The Smasung Migration is a one button at a time, no options wizard. Given that everything’s backed up, I might as well delete all docs and files and all self-installed programmes then try again? It’d mean I’d be able to try more things and try cloning again without waiting 2 hours to see if it works.

Be really careful with these tools as sometimes, with the best of intent, they offer to fix problems and end up making things a lot worse (chkdsk is also in this camp).

Will be wary of them, then. Ta.

Unless you have proof it is defo the hdd, maybe run a ram checker as I’ve had a number of machines suffer “random” BSODs from failing ram. Google “memtest ultimate boot disk” –

Is the Kernel error proof? And the other stuff?

Thanks again for your help.

A bit more I meant to add (the “other stuff”): I get an aural warning a short while (minutes or seconds) before the BSOD, a high pitched whine/whistle that seems to be coming from the HDD, sometimes intermittent, sometimes constant.

So close. And yet, probably just as far away.

All the docs, pics and music backed up, I deleted them from the current HDD, and tried cloning again. The HDD gets really hot, (I’m now guessing the whiney noise is the materials expanding with the heat and closing gaps) and I figured if it’s working for a much shorter time, and open to the air (palmrest off) it might get through cloning without falling over.

Duplication still failed (202MB from completion) but at least it didn’t crash and I got some more info out:

If the file system of original disk has some problems or bad sectors, it may not be duplicated.”

Then

Cloning failed. Failed to retrieve Source Disk information. 205500[0322bc]

Planning to try chkdsk next, I’ve read it should find and partition off the bad sectors?

Then I guess I’m on the phone to Dell to get some OEM disks. Can’t create and use my own, because it won’t work if you’re moving to a smaller HDD/SSD, apparently.

Chkdsk is your next step, yes. It’ll check for bad sectors if you tick the second box.

The discs Dell will send you will be identical to the ones you make yourself, I’d have thought.

You can’t clone large to small if the data area is bigger; you can’t fit a pint into a half pint pot.

Data’s smaller than both, but that’s not the issue, apparently.

A message that keeps cropping up from reading round this is that you can’t restore to a smaller drive than the image file was created for.

It doesn’t matter how large the actual image file is, it’s the total size of the selected HDD’s that the image was created for that matters.

You can go bigger, but not smaller. There are ways round it, shrinking partition sizes and recreating, but we’re getting closer and closer to me effing the whole thing up by getting stuck into things I don’t really understand!

Right, that makes sense. Nothing’s ever simple is it, sorry mate.

No worries, I’ll get there!

Apologies for the delay in response.

A whistling hdd does suggest its on its last legs….

Based on the bsod error, you could disable the page file (it suggests to me it’s thrown a wobbler trying to page something in/out of ram.) The page file can be quite large. Disabling(removing) it should mean the clone software won’t read from the damaged bit of the disk. If you get a good clone, just re enable it.

Possibly consider disabling hibernation, if it’s enabled. This will remove quite a large file from being imaged, too.

Edit: gparted should show all the partitions on a disk inc. hidden ones.

Cheers Baron, I’ll try that too.

Could it be that I’ve got dodgy RAM as well?

No worries about any delay, it’s great that you and others are helping me out at all. I’m hardly going to complain about response times! 🙂

Really wouldn’t recommend trying to image a failing HD: it put a lot of stress on it and is effectively flogging a dying horse. The risk is that it then dies completely and you lose everything. Think of it like a burning house: you wouldn’t try to systematically remove everything from it including all your appliances etc, you’d get the irreplaceable things out first.

So far better to do what you have done and pull off your data (pics, music etc), and go for a fresh install. By all means have a play around with the other suggestions above, but treat it like a (fun?) technical challenge / learning exercise rather than the best way to get a working, reliable system with all your old data up and running. The old disk is basically a bit of tfbundy electronics, so just give up on it.

apj, I know cloning it’s not ideal, it would just be handy if it works. reinstalling windows has been made more awkward by the OEM key being illegible and me moving to a smaller disk. There’s other stuff like Adobe Photshop that I’m not sure if I’ve still got the media for.

All the irreplaceable stuff is safe, so if the HDD dies completely next try, I’m no further back than I am now – looking at a HDD I can’t clone, and asking Dell for replacement install disks.

Re ram – possibly, but you’d be unlucky if it was both (the failure didn’t occur during a lightning storm did it?)
The ram testers on the live cd “ultimate boot disk” (memtest, memtest86) have identified failing ram for me, but I’d worry about the disk first.

Re reading Cougars posts: there might be some mileage in using the built in windows system image backup tool and creating a recovery disk but it might mean jiggling with external drives and partitions (also, I’ve never used it so I don’t know how many hobnobs or bourbons are needed in getting it to work).

There will, if memory serves, be a Dellified version of Windows’ own “create rescue disc” which is likely to be the exact same thing they’ll send out for 20 quid. Sorry, I can’t readily check as I blew mine away years ago when I replaced the OEM Vista with a retail W7 install. I’m pretty sure that’s how it worked though.

I’d be trying that, and I’d be ringing Microsoft’s “phone activation” line. Their licencing team can be surprisingly helpful.

1st prize to BaronVonP7! 😀

Disabled the page file. tried again, and bing, success! I am typing at you from a very quick to boot laptop. Happy chappy!

If you’re in London, or likely to be any time soon, I’d like to buy you a drink. Let me know, email in profile.

And anyone else too, thanks for all your help!

Excellent stuff! Don’t forget to create a system image backup! 🙂

\o/ Good work, sir. I wouldn’t have thought of that.

Don’t forget to create a system image backup!

I can just clone off the old HDD again can’t I? seems pretty straightforward. 😉