HDD cloning failed now my new SSD cannot be accessed by Windows.

WillPatt89 · 11 Jun 2013

Yesterday I bought a new 128GB Verbatim external SSD, I wanted to transfer my OS onto it so I followed this guide, I formatted the SSD to NTFS and got my OS drive down to 104GB and used "EaseUS todo Backup" to clone it onto the SSD, let it run overnight, woke up this morning and saw the PC still on, there was an error message saying it failed to write a sector. Now I cannot access the SSD to reformat it or anything.

Here are some screenshots, please help.

Disk Management view says no media, can only change letter of drive nothing else.
https://i.imgur.com/UrTiyW1.png

Can see my SSD in C: - Properties - Hardware.
https://i.imgur.com/5MP75HX.png

WillPatt89 · 12 Jun 2013

Any advice appreciated... should I try to return the SSD?

bobafetthotmail · 12 Jun 2013

Afaik, Windows 7 cannot be run from USB devices (windows 8 does allow that). Or that it can be done with some trickery and gray-area tools, but it will work only for a single machine (due to licensing limtations).

Anyway, download AOMEI partition assistant (or EASEUS's own partition tool, but it became a bit too bloated imho), and try to reformat that drive.

You can also ask it to do a "surface test" of the drive (right click on the disk, not on the partition and select that option).
If the free version does not do that you can then check the drive with checkdisk. Follow this tutorial, probably you will have to do the option TWO and the line you must write given the pics you posted above is chkdsk E: /F /R
Then you will see what it is doing from the command prompt window.

If in the report at the end it says that there are some bad sectors (or AOMEI tells you that it cannot reformat or finds bad sectors), return the SSD.

As a side note, the tool I indicated above can move the OS to another disk and resize partitions automatically, just choose the disk copy (if you want to copy the whole disk) or migrate OS to SSD or HDD (if you want to copy only the OS partition and bootloaders) wizards from the "wizard" menu.

pscowboy · 12 Jun 2013

You should NOT format a clean drive first before transfer. The backup software will do its job without you having to perform that operation.

Secondly, do an image, not a clone. Cloning is a process basically done in enterprise situations where the techs have to do hundreds of hard drives.

bobafetthotmail · 12 Jun 2013

I respectfully disagree. Formatting will usually fail if the drive is faulty, and this saves time.

Secondly you seem to have some confusion as to what cloning really is. A clone is a disk that is a copy of another disk, how that happened isn't relevant. (actually "clone" means "copy" in biology as well) An image is a file ready to be turned into a clone by some software like macrium or the one the OP used.

Making an image first is useful if you are making backups or if you are into serious mass-cloning like IT techs, but what the OP did (straight clone from source) is perfectly right given his needs.

pscowboy · 12 Jun 2013

Even though the OP got his "used" space down to 104g, when you do a clone operation, the program copies every sector of the existing hard drive used or not. The clone capacity was higher than the new ssd's 128g.

One can reasonably expect a brand new ssd to be viable. I still maintain that formatting first is not necessary.

bobafetthotmail · 12 Jun 2013

I know the program he used, and more or less any modern disk cloning/imaging program (the one I suggested above included) usually ignores free space and resizes the cloned partitions dynamically unless specifically told otherwise (as it also speeds up a lot the cloning process). So you can clone a bigger disk in a smaller one as long as the actual data on it can fit with a couple clicks.

People brought to me a ton of new-but-dead devices, and I prefer to be sure that what I'm working on is actually operational before doing some time-intensive process with it.

pscowboy · 12 Jun 2013

A "quick" format tells you nothing about a drives' viability.

If you're talking about long format, I'm sorry, no tech in his/her right mind is going to do that. Not feasible. For arguments sake, a company wants to replace existing hds with 2tb (or 3tb) and there are 700 peoples desks involved, a long format would take a work day for each one.

I spent 2.5 years as hardware tech at a big company and the last 15-20 in the small business sector. Processed/installed close to 10,000 hds; never had one dead out of the box. Had a few fail within 3 months, but never dead.

A 100g image restore should take less than an hour. That's not time-intensive.

Faladu · 12 Jun 2013

I'm confused from the screen shots, 128gigs FREE, and 232 GIGS total on C: does not a 128 gig SSD make.

An external drive is not suggested for running an OS, you want an internal.

If all you wanted was to IMAGE/COPY the current OS HD for backup, an SSD was overkill.

A SATA docking station (USB 3.0 spec if you have a USB 3.0 ported mobo) + any similar sized SATA HD is recommended for that.

I use Avanquest's Perfect Image 12 for the software side, atm. [screen shot for idea of product features]

bobafetthotmail · 12 Jun 2013

pscowboy said:

A "quick" format tells you nothing about a drives' viability.
A 100g image restore should take less than an hour. That's not time-intensive.

Nope, it tells me if the drive is simply dead. I work in a PC assembly/repair/used PC selling shop that caters the less-than-wealthy, and given the low quality of the hardware we are usually working on, it's not so uncommon to get a dead "new" drive or a dead used one for that matter.