Cloned Hard drive acting funny?

[hyou0079]

Those who may remember me from several months back may remember I was experiencing problems after a technician cloned a dying hard drive for me, most notably windows updates and index weren't working. After it reached the point Windows was constantly failing to recognize itself as genuine, I'd had enough. I recovered the original hard drive and tried loading it into the computer. Although it was VERY slow to boot, the hard drive still worked perfectly once it had been given the chance to boot in its entirety, none of the problems found on the clone were present, leading me to believe the cloning job had simply been poorly done, or the result of cloning an older hard drive model to a larger new model (this I am uncertain is the case). I ended up buying a hard drive cloning dock capable of running offline cloning, and another hard drive of the EXACT same model my Asus G73JH laptop came shipped with. After cloning, it seemed to work fine, and I now had a properly functioning clone of my original hard drive.

Or so I thought. I did notice I had to re-serial key some programs I use, such as Adobe Photoshop CS6, Marmoset and so on. For a while after that, things seemed okay, but I've just discovered Photoshop CS6 doesn't seem to work right anymore, and crashes after selecting a tool to use in it. I uninstalled it, used CCleaner to clean up the registry, and reinstalled CS6, but the problem there persists.

So far, I have not encountered any similar problems, and it may be the issue is unrelated to the cloning, but is there anything else I should have done to properly finalize this cloned hard drive? I have no idea if cloning it to the same model might be causing some sort of redundancy error or if it's something else entirely, I'm just hoping someone can offer some insight.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Anything else you could have done?

Well in my opinion you could/should have installed a fresh Windows from scratch on a the new HDD instead of cloning it from a failing one.

Not saying all your problems stem from that, but how else can you be sure it isn't?

 

[mazboy]

I am not a fan of cloning. It has never worked particularly well for me, and has often failed. The best--in my opinion the only--way to successfully restore a system in which a HDD is failing (or is slowing down, or might have a virus, etc) is to save the data and either wipe the old drive or start with a virgin drive. Do a clean OS install: this includes updating the OS after the install, before doing anything else. Next install and update the motherboard drivers, then the other hardware drivers (video, audio, etc). Before you install any of your old apps, make sure the computer is working properly, using the built-in apps (music player, text editor, browser). At this point, if all is good, you can begin installing your old apps, one at a time, and do a proper update on each one as you go. Finally, reload your data to it's proper place, and you should be good to go.

It's a real pain, but sometimes necessary, to do it that way. It's also the reason you should do weekly data backups and monthly system images (Win 7 and 10 allow you to do this. Win8 probably does, too, but I like to pretend that Win8/8.1 never existed). The cool thing about an image (it's just a special kind of clone) is that if you have one from when everything worked, you can wipe the old hardware (including all your drives) and then use the image to return the system to the way it was before the problem. If the problem persists, you have a hardware problem. If the problem goes away, you had a software/driver/virus problem.

 

[hyou0079]

Anything else you could have done?

Well in my opinion you could/should have installed a fresh Windows from scratch on a the new HDD instead of cloning it from a failing one.

Not saying all your problems stem from that, but how else can you be sure it isn't?

Not that I know of. I remember reading something about using a program to expand the partition space, but since this hard drive the original was cloned to is the exact same size, it didn't strike me as necessary.

I'm not sure the original hard drive could be considered as "failing" either since the only real symptom is very slow bootup speeds, at least thats' what another technician's second opinion was. There were other factors involved such as the motherboard being replaced at the video drivers having to be replaced after an incorrect diagnosis of what was making the computer freeze up in the first place. This is a real quagmire of what could be the case.

 

[Plumboby]

Wacko videocard or window updates throw odd behaivour in clones. I hate cloning a crude system image that's hit or miss. I got an iff y hhd thats on its way out all i am going to do before i swap it save a recovery iso to my new drive bootable. SO i dont loose anything. MS got it downpat to an art to recover if your wise