Hi everyone, looking for help with an SSD/Win problem: My Thinkpad with Win11 has been acting up lately, and I am fairly sure the problem is with the SSD (very high disk load on startup and shortly before each of the many many crashes.) I would like to avoid having to set up my system from scratch.

I have a new SSD and have tried the following:

  • leave bitlocker intact, boot into Ubuntu live, dd the old disk to an external USB drive, install new SSD, dd disk to new SSD
  • same as above but with bitlocker disabled
  • boot into Clonezilla live, clone old SSD to external storage, clone external storage to new SSD
  • clean Windows install on new SSD and clone c: partition to new SSD with Clonezilla

All of these attempts invariably lead to an “INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE” blue screen, and “bootrec /fixboot” and the like executed from the recovery CMD shows “0 Windows installations found.” Booting into Ubuntu live with the cloned SSD installed I can see all my user data intact with no apparent problems.

Is my old SSD/Windows installation broken beyond repair and do I have to accept it and move on or am I missing something?

Thanks for any help or pointers!

  • Blaster M
    3•1 year ago

    Make sure the EFI partition has the “boot, esp” label and the Windows partition has the “msftdata” label. That’ll help the windows boot fixer find stuff. Also bootrec /rebuildbcd

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•1 year ago

      Thanks for the reply. The bootrec commands I all tried to no avail (all say no windows installation found.) Surely, my latest attempt has the correct boot partitions after I let the Windows installer handle it all and overwrote only partition 3 afterwards? I’ll check again anyway, thanks.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•1 year ago

      I see 4 partitions in GParted after attempt 4 as described in my post:

      • p1 fat32, boot/hidden/esp 260MB
      • p2 unknown, msftres 16MB
      • p3 ntfs, msftdata 470GB (this is the one I cloned from the old SSD)
      • p4 ntfs, hidden/diag 1000MB

      So, seems correct?

      • OtherbarryEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        That sort of looks right, did the old SSD have the same configuration? According to that partition list you also have an extra partition, maybe a Lenovo recovery/repair partition or something bitlocker related. Your old SSD probably has p1 or p2 a bootable.

        Overall you don’t need to do it this way but what I’d do roughly speaking…

        1. Format the new SSD, make sure the partition style is the same as old SSD (GPT vs MBR) - Maybe Clonezilla already takes care of that? I can’t remember offhand
        2. Note which partition is active/bootable on the old SSD
        3. Use Clonezilla to clone the whole drive, all partitions
        4. Make sure the newly cloned SSD has the correct active/bootable partition
        5. Go into your BIOS, make sure the newly installed drive is still the first/second boot device (on a laptop it should be, in theory) - second if you want to keep your USB drives booting first for troubleshooting
        6. Try to boot up - If Windows still isn’t coming up then boot into your Windows 11 USB and try to “repair” the Windows install e.g. instead of installing try to go into Repair, Troubleshoot, Startup Repair

        PS - Probably not what you want but worst case you can do a clean install of Windows 11 & then manually copy over your data (back up first!). Maybe not ideal but at least you’ll have a fresh install to work with.

        • @[email protected]OP
          1•1 year ago

          Hey, thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it!

          Clonezilla indeed takes care of all the partitioning and the flags. I cloned the old SSD to the new SSD once more and it of course still won’t boot. (Never mind that partition 3 of old SSD says bitlocker- I reenabled it after taking the disk image.)

          This is really frustrating. It’s not even about the data since everything is synced to my server anyway, but installing all the software again and tweaking everything so it feels like “my” system is just a lot of effort I would have liked to avoid. Starting to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t happening. I probably won’t do it, but I have half a mind to ditch Windows again. If only MS Office didn’t make such a convincing argument in my day-to-day…

          • OtherbarryEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            That’s annoying… even doing a Startup Repair with the Windows 11 USB doesn’t repair it and get it starting up? Thinking on a normal install all this should have already worked, makes me wonder if Bitlocker is somehow a culprit here.

            But I guess worst case is to back up your data, do a fresh install of Windows 11, restore your data/re-install applications & move on. At some point that’s going to end up being faster than troubleshooting failed cloning attempts.

            • @[email protected]OP
              2•1 year ago

              Yeah, I have reached that point yesterday. Gave it one last shot with MS’ own system image tool and same results. The upside - doing a system recovery with the “keep my data” option actually worked okay. User data, ssh keys and so on still there, and an HTML file on the Desktop with a list of all the apps that were removed. Could have been worse… Thanks again for the help!

        • @[email protected]OP
          1•1 year ago

          When you say

          Note which partition is active/bootable on the old SSD

          you mean which partition has the “boot” flag, correct?