Can't clone drive using Macrium Reflect..??

JustAnotherSaver

Well before your post came in I took out the old HDD and switched for the SSD. 

I used the recovery USB I made through Acronis years ago to get the laptop back to original state which I have used before so I know it works. 

It finished the recovery but then failed to boot. A required drive is missing. Must be something special about that HDD. 

jsmith9

Without having the laptop in front of me I can only guess, but I suspect it is the driver for the SSD that may be missing ? The recovery USB was presumably made from a system running on a HDD?

The solution might be to boot from your windows 10 dvd and 'repair' the system

JustAnotherSaver

Well i've tried various now and still getting nowhere.

I'm currently in the middle of ignoring bad sectors and ploughing on anyway with Macrium but i'm not totally happy with that as what is in these bad sectors??!

So i tried the recovery USB that i made with Acronis and installed this to the SSD. That didn't work as it wouldn't boot.

So then i put the HDD back in and fired it up. It then ran chkdsk which took forever and a day. I got as far as this:

Before i lost patience and went in to town. It had booted to Windows on my return.

I tried again - got a little further, maybe 37% this time, failed again.

I removed Balena at least. Same problem, didn't work.

I tried the Windows 7 Recovery Disc - again, didn't work.

Now i'm, on to ignoring bad sectors.

EDIT: Tried ignoring bad sectors - failed at 88%, error 9, a I/O error.

debitcardmayhem

Why not install W10 on the SSD, that hard disk is more or less goosed, you may be able to recover some of your data.

Of course you could run the restore to the hdd, since it needs another drive, then clone again, but I think that is a bad idea, that disk is on its last legs. You could check what partitions are on it an create them on the SSD, then try the restore. But hey it's your system

getmore4less

I had issues with a HDD that was falling apart back in 2017, probably a lot worse than yours as the system had got flaky.

run hardware diagnostics to check the disc mine had a chunk that would not read.

The Samsung software to clone to SSD would not touch it  but I can't remember what I used to do it in the end(can't find my notes).

IT was one of the free options

jsmith9

Maybe I missed it but I did not realise you were running Windows 7, I assumed it was Windows 10.

Looks like you have a failing HDD and so there is little point in imaging that to the SSD even if you could as all you would get is a SSD with data sectors missing. 

You should in any case probably abandon the idea and install windows 7 from scratch - see article below and any others you can find via Google on replacing a HDD with SSD on W7:

Adding an SSD to a Windows 7 PC | Windows | The Guardian

"Swapping one hard drive for another is generally pretty simple, because you can "clone" one to the other. However, hard drives and SSDs are not the same, and Windows 7 – the only version of Windows designed to work with SSDs – treats them differently. For example,Windows 7 optimises the hard drive using Prefetch and Superfetch, and does some automatic defragmentation. These routines are not needed with SSDs, and the defragging can be considered harmful. You can, of course, "clone" a laptop hard drive to an SSD, but that will produce an SSD that's set up to work as a hard drive."

JustAnotherSaver

I'm currently not at the house so can't check anything but with your end comment are you saying that if I clone to a SSD then it wont work as it'll think its a HDD? 

At any rate, no its Windows 7. It also has to stay as Windows 7 as its really a laptop for vehicle diagnostics which don't run on Windows 10 unless I buy new diagnostic gear which I dont need to do. My wife is using it just to browse the Internet and YouTube as her ipad died but nothing serious like banking. 

I could start afresh but on the HDD is a hidden partition which is a recovery partition that I was ideally wanting to copy over. How would I do this? 

jsmith9

Well the very first thing you have to do is to let me know if your sdd is supported under Windows 7 in other words when you bought it does it say it is suitable for Windows 7 systems -  you will need the Windows 7 Driver to use it

You could try using macron reflect to copy over the hidden recovery partition there may not be any read errors on that part of the disc if you are very very lucky!

getmore4less

I still have the old disc I cloned stuck it in a PC and looked at what was on it.

After the samsung software was put on
next day seatools( it was a seagate drive) remember checking the drive
next day minitool partition wizard  free 9.1 was put on 

That was the last thing to get put on that disk
Looks like that is what I used to migrate to the SSD

newer versions that feature might have moved to the pay option.

JustAnotherSaver

What is the SSD?

Its the Western Digital Blue 500GB SSD. Bought it off Amazon for about £45 last week.