Issues cloning windows 10 drive for backup

[liberty610]

Hi everyone!

I am getting a new motherboard and cpu for my production studio work, and i want to make a clone/image of my current Windows 10 pro drive, so if there is any issues with my new board/cpu, i can go back to my current setup.

I have acronis true image 2017 on a boot USB drive. I also have an external 2TB 3.0 usb drive. My issue is, when I boot into true image and true to clone my Windows 10 drive, my Samsung 950 pro M.2 SSD that windows is installed on is greyed out when I try to select it as the source drive. It also says it is a Dynamic drive for some reason, and after reading up online, I am assuming this is making it greyed out...?

Anyone have any suggestions for me? Thanks in advanced.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Can you post screenshot from Disk Management?

 

[liberty610]

I can later today after I get back to my studio. What is a good site to host images off of? Just a heads up, i have a lot of drives on this system, so that screen shot will look a little ocer the top. This is my system:

https://pcpartpicker.com/b/BqHhP6

 

[SkyNetRising]

imgur.com and tinypic.com can be used for pic sharing.

 

[SkyNetRising]

BTW - you can make copy of dynamic volume with Minitool partition wizard free.

 

[liberty610]

Awesome. I'll Google that today and give it a try. If all goes as planned, I'll be getting my new board Friday if the pre order ships on time. So the sooner I get this taken care of, the better.

 

[liberty610]

As for the disk management screen shot, here that is:

http://imgur.com/a/lJY3p

I have removed drive letters and names of certain drives for privacy reasons. Hopefully that isn't an issue. The 'new volume' 2tb drive is the USB 3.0 drive I planned on using as my destination drive for the clone.

 

[liberty610]

Ok, so I grabbed a copy of that Minitool partition wizard app, and got my drive cloned over to my USB drive. Everything seems to be good to go.

I am not sure exactly why, but I did have issues at first booting back into Windows from the SSD when it was done. I kept getting a failed to boot blue screen style, and an automatic repair fail error. Because of that error, I decided to try and boot Windows from the USB external drive that it cloned to. It successfully loaded my exact Windows 10 setup off of the External USB. It sure took a while of course (lol), but it did boot.

So after I booted successfully from the external drive, I did a proper shut down, and then disconnected the external USB. Rebooted, went into my boot options, and tried to boot once again from the SSD. For some reason, the SSD is listed there 3 times, each one labeled differently. Example, one was just Samsung SSD, the other was UIOE (or something to that effect) and the other was a Windows boot option one. I tried all three with the external drive plugged in, but they wouldn't boot. But once I unplugged the external drive, I picked one of the options for the SSD (can't remember which one exactly) and it showed a spinning icon with diagnostic message under my Gigabyte splash screen logo, and shortly after went to a black screen with some text on it from the miniTool setup, and then booted right into Windows normally. Not really sure why I had issues at first like this, but needless to say, boith drives are booting my Windows 10 setup now, and I should be good to restore this current motherboard and cpu if needed.

Thanks for the help!

 

[liberty610]

UPDATE:

Just to make sure I was in the clear, I decided to restart my system too make sure everything was okay on my ssd boot. I'm not back to getting the blue screen error that says 'your pc ran into a problem and needs to restart'.

except this time I cannot get it to boot back into Windows the matter which SSD option I choose in the boot menu. not sure what's going on here, but I got it to boot up just fine a few minutes ago. I even loaded optimize default in the motherboard settings, and nothing is working correctly. I'm attempting to boot back into Windows from the external drive which looks like it's doing just fine, but my SSD where the original set up as come from is not booting correctly again.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Well - you did couple of things wrong there.

• 1st - automatic repair rarely does anything you want, when multiple boot drives are connected. When it fails, you have to guess, what it did, and fix things manually. It probably fixed booting from USB device, but somehow <mod edit> up booting from SSD.
  2nd - loading optimized defaults in BIOS wasn't really necessary. By doing that, you most likely disabled booting from pcie/nvme device. This option usually is not enabled in default settings.

To fix things:

• 1. disconnect all sata, usb drives first;
  2. Restore BIOS settings to state before loading safe defaults - enable booting from pcie/nvme device.
  3. Check, if you can boot into OS (I'm guessing that will not be possible just yet);
  4. Boot from windows installation media;
  5. Check, if everything is ok on ssd (EFI system partition might be hidden after auto repair).
  • diskpart
    list disk
    select disk 0
    list partition
    select partition 2
    attributes volume
    (if the volume is hidden, then clear hidden attribute)
    attributes volume clear hidden
    exit
  6. Use bcdboot command to fix bootloader
  a) check volume drive letters first
  • diskpart
    list volume
    exit
  b) if EFI system partition doesn't have drive letter, then assign it.
  • diskpart
    list disk
    select disk 0
    list partition
    select partition 2
    assign letter=y
    exit
  c) use bcdboot command to fix bootloader
  • bcdboot c:\windows /s y:
  (c: - windows partition, y: - bootloader partition)
  7. Reboot and check, if you can boot into OS.

<Moderator Warning: You've been a member here long enough to know that that language is not permitted in these forums>

 

[liberty610]

Thanks for the Reply!

Well, I am back up and running, but I took a different approach. The default settings actually include boot from pcie/nvme, so that was not an issue.

I was able to boot into Windows without any issues using my external mirrored drive several times, which lead me to believe the mirrored drive was fine. Took a while to load everything with it being through USB, but it worked.

So what I ended up doing was, taking my Windows 10 USB installer, and loading it up to reinstall a fresh Windows 10 on the SSD. During the setup, I couldn't install it to the SSD right away, because it was still in GPT partition? I am assuming that had something to do with the dynamic disk ordeal? Either way, I couldn't install it without doing the Shift+F10 ordeal and typing in the commands to clear the drive.

Once I was able to clear it, I reinstalled windows to make sure the drive was working properly. Once I booted into Windows and saw everything was good to go, I restarted with my bootlable USB drive that has acronis true image 2017 on it. I figured that since the SSD drive was no longer in Dynamic mode, I could easily copy the cloned external drive back to the SSD. So I booted into acronis true image 2017, cloned the external drive back to the SSD drive, and I am back up and running hammering at my keyboard with thjis post as we speak!

For the record, Gigabyte's customer service rep was totally clueless and pointless to even talk to about this....

 

[SkyNetRising]

Glad it worked out for you.
Recloning from usb back to ssd was another option, but that requires way more time, than just fixing boot issues.
You could have skipped windows installation step to save some more time.

 

[liberty610]

Glad it worked out for you.
Recloning from usb back to ssd was another option, but that requires way more time, than just fixing boot issues.
You could have skipped windows installation step to save some more time.

Yea, I realize that now, but running the Windows 10 installer was the only way I knew how to get it out of GPT mode, and I wanted to make sure everything would work right on a fresh install in case something extra may have coincidentally happened to the drive or something. By continuing with the Windows 10 fresh install, I was able to clearly see there was no issue with the SSD or the chipset, as Gigabyte's rep repeatedly told me there was.....