Cloning a Windows 10 drive

[Jimmy B]

Since no-one else has answered this...
Your old SSD already contains a copy of your current system. I would keep it as it is for 2-3 weeks in case the new drive fails. It is extremely unlikely to fail, but if it does so, it will probably be in the first few days or weeks. (It will eventually wear out after a very large number of read/write operations, but I wouldn't worry about that now).
After that, having checked that the Recovery Partition is intact on the new drive, and possibly creating a Recovery Drive on a USB stick, the old SSD is "spare". You can install it as an extra drive on your PC, either internally if you have space or in a USB caddy. This is extremely useful for many different purposes including backing up your data. For more ideas of what those purposes may be, I suggest you search the internet for "how to use the D Drive".

[Marbury]

Thanks. Unfortunately I have had the pc freeze twice in the last few days with this blue screen message

"Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart".

It then goes into a re-boot so at least not a crash that nothing can be done with. Should I be worried as this never happened with the old drive ?

[Jimmy B]

Yes you should be worried. A system that randomly crashes is of no use to anyone.

I would go back to the old drive and make sure that the problem goes away. Then swap to the new drive and see if it comes back again. That way you can be sure of the source of the problem.

[Marbury]

I am hoping its hardware related asmy aging Komplete K6 AI has a terrible usb port that has become so flaky. That was flashing when the crash happened indicating it was offline. I have since added more software to the new drive too that I am working on so its not very practical to go back to the older drive. Perhaps running CC cleaner or something similar might find the problem ? Really hate this kind of thing.

[Jimmy B]

You really need to pin this down, or otherwise you will be living with a system that you can't trust.
If you were using the Komplete K6 AI before you upgraded and it wasn't crashing, then it's hard to see why it's crashing now. I suggest that you wiggle the connector and see if you can get it to crash. If you can successfully cause the problem, you are a step closer to fixing it.
You need to be absolutely certain that it is not a hardware problem related to the new SSD or its installation (such as a loose connector), before you proceed with that as the heart of your system.

[Marbury]

The two instances it has happened has been when on Youtube if that is any help.

[Jimmy B]

It does indicate that you should probably set it looping on YouTube while you wiggle the USB connector. We are looking for a reliable way to cause the problem, as a first step to finding out what it is.

[OneWorld]

Thanks. Unfortunately I have had the pc freeze twice in the last few days with this blue screen message

"Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart".

It then goes into a re-boot so at least not a crash that nothing can be done with. Should I be worried as this never happened with the old drive ?

First thing I do if I get anything like this is look at the Event Viewer/System, also, look at the My Computer/Properties - are there any entries that have the yellow exclamation mark or the red X?

When using the Event Viewer I sometimes clear the entries and then if and when there's a fault, it is easier to find amongst the list of events.

I would try and get back to day 1.
Get hold of an old drive
Put your original (pre-SSD drive) drive back in and test.
If everything works OK make a drive image (youo will yet another drive to store the image on)
Remove the working 'old' drive
Put the spare/old drive in
I am assuming you have made a Macrium Boot CD, boot from that
Restore the image to the spare/old drive, boot and test
If all is well it suggests either the SSD is duff (bad sectors etc) or the cloning process didn't quite work out. In which case you will need to delete the partition(s) on the SSD
Create a new partition (you won't need to format as when restoring from an image, Macrium will format a target drive) - it will ask if you want to format the target drive using all the space or create a partition to contain the imaged partition (that way if you want you could use spare space on the drive to create a second partition and hence a d:drive)
I tend to choose format the whole thing, less things to go wrong, keep it simple
Then boot from your SSD and hopefully things are fixed.

Spare drives - I have a drawer full of them. Sky HD boxes have a 500GIG drive in them. The charity shop near me sells Sky HD boxes at £3.00 I buy them and take the drive out. I then restore images to those drives and I have WinXP/Win7/Win10/Linux some with my music software/some not, so if anything does go wrong with a drive, I slot one of the spares in and off I go I have a working systems that is useful for fault finding by substitution and when I buy and install a new drive, I have a working boot drive at my disposal. OK there seems to be an element of redundancy in my set-up, but the way I see it, better to have too many working set-ups than not enough, you can't have too many back-ups, and I have found SSDs can just go pop. It has happened twice, just stopped working - nay bother, slot a spare drive in

Also, and many would agree. keep data on a separate drive. A system drive can easily be re-built, but getting data off a duff drive can sometimes be difficult, so use a separate drive and back it up regularly

[Jimmy B]

Excellent advice, and what a great idea on the Sky HD box! I shall investigate my local charity shop forthwith.

[Marbury]

Thanks for the advice, a lot to think about. I did a quick check of the device manager and didn't see anything flagged up yellow or red.

Ok, before I go into all that, I did the test of wiggling the usb cable in the back of the K6 and it did crash YouTube, putting the pc into "Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart".

So I think there is the problem, a very lose usb socket on the K6. A new AI is probably now needed.

Here is the setup

Local disc (C) (newly cloned Windows 1TB ssd)

Media Backup (D) (music, images etc 2TB (standard mechanical type)

Local disc (E) 111GB (72.1GB used) 39GB free.

Local disc (F) 464GB (390GB used) 71.3GB free. (this is the old windows system drive)

Both system (old and new) ssd drives have 5 partitions, so I am assuming the E drive is the recovery.

This is the order of the new ssd cloned drives partitions.

1) NTFS primary (Recovery) 432MB used
2) Fat 32 LBA Primary 26.5MB used
3) Unformatted Primary 16MB used (16mb full capacity)
4) NTFS Primary 432MB used
5) C: NTFS Primary 406GB used

It would have been so much easier to make a screenshot and upload here but it doesn't allow it.

I do have a spare 1TB mechanical drive with a clone of the old ssd so perhaps my next step is to clone this new ssd onto that afresh ? Then make an image on another drive.

[Jimmy B]

It's good news that you were able to replicate the problem. I would try a new USB cable first (because it's cheaper), then a new AI. Can you get the AI on sale or return, in case it doesn't solve the problem?
When you can leave it looping on YouTube for a couple of days, and wiggling the USB connector doesn't cause a crash, you can be reasonably confident that you have found and fixed the problem.
If the problem still remains, you have a good set of instructions from OneWorld as to what to do next.

[Marbury]

I'm convinced its the K6 that is at fault as the usb connection has been dodgy for a long time (and I did try a few different leads). ef37a here kindly took it from me and fitted me a new usb housing on the board. It has bought me a couple of years but to be fair, it was never going to last. There is a known issue with these units failing at the usb connection as the design isn't very rigid. No way I can get a return as I bought it at Dawsons a few years ago and they are now gone. native Instruments were never good at responding to the issue when I tried to contact them. It would be nice to get something with a few more inputs and NOT made by native Instruments. Once bitten.

[Jimmy B]

OK, if you are sure that this is the problem.
It's a shame because I just looked at the K6 on their website and I thought that it looked like a good choice.
I still don't think that I could live with a fault like that - I would be annoyed if it crashed and lost some work that I cared about.
It is supposed to be possible to post links to images on the forum. Here are some instructions:
https://www.soundonsound.com/forum/view ... hp?t=75253

[Marbury]

I could run some pc health checks etc but pretty sure its the K6. Good unit when working properly (blu tak keeps the usb in place)

I have a mechanical drive that I made an image on some time ago (WD 1TB) I have tried to clone the new ssd drive onto it using Macrium reflect (also a 1TB drive) and its giving me an error "the target disk has an incompatible sector size for this operation, please choose a different drive" but they are both 1TB drives

[Jimmy B]

I haven't seen that before, but this looks relevant:
https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/displ ... k+Selected

[Marbury]

I have tried it all ways and there seems to be no way around this problem. There is a previous image written on the WD drive I want to clone which may have caused the problem.

[OneWorld]

Excellent advice, and what a great idea on the Sky HD box! I shall investigate my local charity shop forthwith.

One thing with the sky had boxes, they are a pig to open up, there’s a knack to it, I got it down to about 3 minutes now. I reckon £2 or £3 for a decent 500gig hdd is worth the effort. Ok not a massive amount of storage but enough to keep a copy of a system drive on, etc

[Jimmy B]

If I read the link correctly, if you have the drive in a USB caddy that is a likely cause of the problem. Is that the case here? If so, one solution would be to temporarily mount the drive in the PC instead, to clone the partition.
Alternatively, do you really need a clone of the partition? Provided you have a spare bootable disk of some kind, you might be just as well off with an image backup. It's just slightly more trouble to restore it to a new disk, if you ever need to do so.

[Jimmy B]

I reckon £2 or £3 for a decent 500gig hdd is worth the effort. Ok not a massive amount of storage but enough to keep a copy of a system drive on, etc

Yes, and if you use an external caddy, they would be a great place to archive data backups.

[OneWorld]

I reckon £2 or £3 for a decent 500gig hdd is worth the effort. Ok not a massive amount of storage but enough to keep a copy of a system drive on, etc

Yes, and if you use an external caddy, they would be a great place to archive data backups.

Because they are identical drives, they are great for making a NAS, you could have a 2 or even drive setup, well that's I've done, bought an empty NAS box and populated it with 2 of the drives

For opening the sky hd boxes consult youtube