[SOLVED] Windows borked after hard drive failure, where to go from here ?

[njebs_mac]

I had a S.M.A.R.T drive failure message appear after a series of crashes (self-inflicted, i was being fast and loose while oc-ing) for my 1TB hard drive. My boot drive is an SSD and is fine. I booted the windows repair tool off an external drive and attempted to repair, tried to restore, tried several CMD methods for repair, but none seemed to have worked. On another note, I've also noticed that when booting from the external drive, the "C:" drive is no longer my SSD and is some random small partition with an empty text file, and my SSD has moved to the "E:" drive. Is this related?

Anyway I've finally ordered a new hard drive, and was wondering if it was possible to transfer the data between the old one and the new one, or if it was possible to reinstall windows without losing that data ?

Thanks in advance for the help

 

[Deleted member 14196]

I would reinstall windows having only the SSD connected to power while installing. Once installed then you can hook up the secondary Drive. That way if the hard drive crashes again windows will still boot. The problem you had is that some of your boot files where On the hdd Because you probably installed windows with all the drives connected.

I don’t believe there’s any way that you can preserve the files that you have so hopefully you had a backup of your data

 

[Bob.B]

I had a S.M.A.R.T drive failure message appear after a series of crashes (self-inflicted, i was being fast and loose while oc-ing) for my 1TB hard drive. My boot drive is an SSD and is fine. I booted the windows repair tool off an external drive and attempted to repair, tried to restore, tried several CMD methods for repair, but none seemed to have worked. On another note, I've also noticed that when booting from the external drive, the "C:" drive is no longer my SSD and is some random small partition with an empty text file, and my SSD has moved to the "E:" drive. Is this related?

Anyway I've finally ordered a new hard drive, and was wondering if it was possible to transfer the data between the old one and the new one, or if it was possible to reinstall windows without losing that data ?

Thanks in advance for the help

Is this 1TB disk and the ssd 2 different disk?

 

[njebs_mac]

I would reinstall windows having only the SSD connected to power while installing. Once installed then you can hook up the secondary Drive. That way if the hard drive crashes again windows will still boot.

Yeah I've always found the way windows installs on all drives instead of a designated boot drive by default is really weird, and is just kind of asking for this kind of stuff to happen.

On that note, would I have to do a fresh reinstall or is there some kind of repair install that reinstalls windows and leaves other files as they are?

 

[njebs_mac]

Is this 1TB disk and the ssd 2 different disk?

No the SSD is a boot drive, the failed drive is a 1tb hard drive

 

[Deleted member 14196]

You could try repair just don’t have anything else plugged in when you do it. I think there is a way to create the needed boot files on your SSD using bcdboot

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...sktop/bcdboot-command-line-options-techref-di

if you can use that to fix your boot ssd, then repair or reinstall should not be necessary. if you had installed programs to the failed HDD, then you would have to reinstall them to the SSD or your new HDD

 

[njebs_mac]

Ok update, it seems I hadn't exhausted all my options with the windows recovery tool. What I'm doing right now is using the custom install option and installing new windows onto the C: drive (with the failed drive completely taken out of the PC). From what I've read online, all I need to do is grab the old stuff from the windows.old file and then run a disk cleaner to get rid of anything unnecessary. Its extremely cumbersome and I'll need to re-install some apps and ive lost alot of settings and preferences and stuff.
Thanks for the advice anyway, I'll try to recover what I can from the hard drive once the new one arrives.

 

[USAFRet]

"grab the old stuff from the windows.old file "

What "stuff" specifically?

 

[njebs_mac]

"grab the old stuff from the windows.old file "

What "stuff" specifically?

User data from before the reinstall, photos, music ect. anything that wasn't on my hard drive. I know that a lot of programs really don't want to migrate drives because of registry discrepancies so I'll probably have to reinstall most of it.

 

[USAFRet]

User data from before the reinstall, photos, music ect. anything that wasn't on my hard drive. I know that a lot of programs really don't want to migrate drives because of registry discrepancies so I'll probably have to reinstall most of it.

Assume you need to reinstall ALL applications.

Photo/music/video, fine.


(and this case is specifically what backups are for)

 

[njebs_mac]

Assume you need to reinstall ALL applications.

Photo/music/video, fine.


(and this case is specifically what backups are for)

Do you think it's ok if I just nuke everything in "windows.old\Windows" now? My SSD is tiny.

 

[USAFRet]

Do you think it's ok if I just nuke everything in "windows.old\Windows" now? My SSD is tiny.

'tiny' as in....?

 

[njebs_mac]

'tiny' as in....?

26GB/232GB and I'm currently installing stuff. Nvm anyway, I'm just transferring windows.old onto an external drive

 

[USAFRet]

Ok update, it seems I hadn't exhausted all my options with the windows recovery tool. What I'm doing right now is using the custom install option and installing new windows onto the C: drive (with the failed drive completely taken out of the PC). I'm still waiting for the hard drive to arrive but for the time being my system is working again.

A custom install....full wipe, etc...fixes everything except a physically failing drive.