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!
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.
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!