Wiley Computer Works

Tech Note: Cloning Hard Drives Externally

(The unexpectedly complicated instructions for cloning a hard drive outside of its computer when it is going bad.)

Last week I solved the best stumper in a long time. It was one for the books, so here’s the book.

The job started out routine enough: clone an old-and-slow mechanical hard drive (HD) onto a new-and-fast Solid State Drive (SSD) and then install the new much-faster drive in the old computer to speed it up.

The reason we do this is because the common mechanical hard drives that had been the standard for decades can’t go any faster than their moving parts will allow (in addition to some old-school design limitations in their job queuing), and meanwhile everything else that’s electronic and non-mechanical in a computer has sped up many times over in these same decades. The result is that the old-school spinning mechanical hard drive is the slowest part in just about any computer built in the last 10 years, again because everything but the hard drive keeps getting faster and faster.

Once a computer’s mechanical hard drive is replaced with a new Solid State Drive, the new slowest part of the computer will now be the processor. As long as the processor is sufficiently faster than the old hard drive, a new Solid State Drive will give the old computer a very noticeable and welcomed performance boost along with a few additional years of productive life.

To put some numbers to it, I use a website called cpubenchmark.net. More precisely, I do a Google search of the processor model I want to evaluate. One of the top few search results will be its cpubenchmark.net score. This is a completely arbitrary scale but you get used to it quickly. If the processor’s score here is in the 1000-2000 range (some are even lower, like really old AMD A6 processors), the computer isn’t really a candidate for the Solid State Drive upgrade: the processor isn’t sufficiently faster than the old hard drive for there to be a noticeable difference with a new Solid State Drive. The computer will remain almost as slow as before because the processor is also slow and can’t be upgraded.

On this benchmark scale, even though the scale is meant to measure the power of processors, I’d put an old hard drive’s score somewhere under 1000, just for a swag relational-type comparison.

If, on the other hand, a processor’s benchmark score is in the 3000 range (common with later Intel Core Duo), there will be a somewhat noticeable boost given by a new solid state drive and the decision comes down to economics and hassle. (Would you rather spend about $350 and upgrade to an SSD for only a somewhat better performance or just get a new computer for $1200 and more hassle and unbelievably great performance?) Further, if the processor is, for example, an Intel i5 with the benchmark range of 6000-9000 depending on exact model and generation, the performance boost will be nothing short of spectacular and $350 is very well spent. The computer’s owner will say that it hasn’t performed this well since it was brand new. They can definitely put off buying a new computer (which, like cars, only get better each year so the longer you wait the better one you get). Just to complete the scale, the processors on new computers benchmark from around 14,000 to 20,000 as long as you get at least an i7 or a Ryzen 7, which you shouldn’t get any less than. (An i3 is a complete waste. An i5 will get old much faster than an i7. Just get an i7. It’s the same with Ryzens, essentially, but make sure they’re 5th generation, which are even better than their Intel equivalents.)

Adding to mechanical hard drive woes is that they get slower over time for two reasons. One, the magnetic medium and the sensing electronics deteriorate with time, and when that happens the hard drive has to repeat its operations a few times for every one of its millions of tasks to be sure that it’s giving you good data retrieved from storage. It’s similar to a favorite old music tape that’s worn out and sounding muddy. Two, there seems to be an occasional Microsoft update that old hard drives dislike. I’ve never been able to find out why, but sometimes after a Windows update, multiple clients call at the same time to complain about their computers suddenly slowing down. No matter how I try to optimize the computer after this, they never get much better. Only a hard drive upgrade to a Solid State Drive makes the computer any good again.

So a routine HD upgrade to SSD is done as follows:

- Put a Samsung SATA SSD into an adapter. (Currently I’m using Samsung 870 EVO 1 TB.)
- Plug the adapter into power and connect the adapter’s USB cable to the computer. Turn on the adapter.
- Check the computer’s power settings to make sure that it won’t go to sleep during cloning. I also make the monitor stay on so I can glance at the progress occasionally and know whether it's either still going or has actually finished or is stuck.
- Download and run the Samsung Data Migration Tool.
- Start the cloning. It averages a couple of hours to clone, but sometimes it only takes one hour and sometimes it takes four hours. This depends on the processor’s power and on the condition of the old hard drive.
- Once the cloning is complete, the software will shut down the computer to prevent any new changes from occurring that wouldn’t get cloned.
- Replace the old hard drive with the new SSD and restart the computer. (Usually it’s that simple but occasionally you have to tell the computer to use the new SSD for booting.)

I’ve done dozens of these upgrades.

Well, for the first time I had a slow computer that wouldn’t make any progress on cloning itself for two full hours in two attempts. That meant the old hard drive was too far gone to handle cloning itself and was getting dangerously close to completely crashing. What to do? Try cloning the old hard drive from one adapter to an SSD in another adapter using another computer (my main work station). I found software for this at easeus.com where I had recently purchased other good software for PDF editing, for product key retrieval out of registries, and for data recovery from crashed hard drives. I found a 51% discount coupon at retailmenot.com so the software was only about $30. (Where did they come up with 51%?)

The cloning worked, but the computer wouldn’t boot with the new SSD installed. Rather, it gave a blue screen with an error code and at first I thought that the cloning didn't work because the old hard drive was too far gone. I let the old hard drive rest and cool off overnight and then tried cloning it again to another SSD with exactly the same results. It might sound surprising to hear that this indicated that the cloning might actually have worked correctly after all. (First, the old hard drive was too far gone to let me retrieve the client's data files manually when inserted into an adapter on my workstation. I didn't yet try using data retrieval software. I decided to see whether the cloning software would take care of that. Second, the first cloned SSD would let me retrieve the client's data files manually after cloning and they looked good. The Windows folder also looked good and included the file that the error message had said was missing as noted below. The second cloned SSD was exactly the same as the first. Therefore, the software probably correctly cloned the HD to the SSD after all. That same company makes data retrieval software and hopefully that technology is employed when cloning a marginal hard drive. It was an assumption with a reasonable confidence level which later turned out to be correct.)

Now comes the hard part. What could possibly be wrong? It took a couple of days of research to find the right answer, and this needs to be documented because I’ll not likely remember it later.

When I plugged in the adapter containing the old hard drive, my work station assigned it the drive letter G:, which is pretty common, since I already have C:, D:, E:, and F: drives in my work station.

When the SSD was finished being cloned, my computer assigned it the drive letter B:, which was a surprise because I hadn’t seen the B: drive letter since the old, old days of floppy disk drives but other than that I didn’t think anything of it.

What I didn’t know at the time was that when I installed the cloned SSD into the computer, the computer was expecting the boot drive to be the C: drive but the SSD still thought it was the B: drive. So when the computer tried to boot from the SSD it gave a blue screen error that I didn’t record but on that screen was the option to hit F8 for more info. When I did so, that screen said:

“Your PC/Device needs to be repaired
The application couldn’t be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors.

“File: \WINDOWS\system32\winload.efi
Error Code: 0X0000000e”

Here’s what to do:

- Launch a Windows installation media in the computer but hit Repair Your Computer instead and then boot to a Command Prompt Window (it looks like a DOS window).
- Run “bootrec /scanos”. This will tell you what drive letter the computer is expecting Windows to be on.
- You’ll probably get the response “C:\Windows”
- If so, then run “bcdboot C:\Windows”. (In some rare cases, you’ll need to run “bcdboot C:\Windows /s c:” If so, look up the details.)

Now the SSD should begin a normally-looking boot, but you’ll be offered two different icons for Windows 10 (in this case). Choose the top one. If given the option, set it as the default.

Shut down and boot again to make sure the top one will still boot the computer successfully. (If you chose the bottom one just out of curiosity, you’ll get the same blue screen error that you got when you first tried to boot after external cloning. Just force a restart.)

Once you’re sure that the top Windows 10 icon is the right one, you’ll need to stop the lower (and wrong) one from appearing during boot up. This is another thing I hadn't seen since way back in the Windows XP days when we'd have Windows 98SE as a second OS since Windows XP was from a completely new family of software (NT-based vs. DOS-based). Fortunately, I remembered how to do this part. Do this:

- Click on Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Advanced (Tab) > Settings (the third one under Startup and Recovery) > Uncheck the box at “Time to display list of operating systems” or just set the time to 0 > click OK > click OK.

Now the computer should boot without a problem.

The only glitch the client had on this computer after all of this complication was the QuickBooks license was missing. I don’t know whether this was caused by the old hard drive failing, by the newly cloned SSD originally thinking it was drive B:, or by my upgrading the computer to Windows 11 after cloning the hard drive. (I wait to do the time consuming updates until after the faster SSD is installed. Plus, if something disastrous happens, I can simply reinstall the old hard drive and start over.) Whatever the cause was, it was easy to fix by downloading and running a repair tool from Intuit. Just follow the instructions in the error message.

So that's the new trick, cloning a hard drive outside of its computer. At first it will look like it didn't work, but the above steps will complete the job properly by telling the SSD that it's the C: drive now after the cloning process gave it some other drive letter on a computer that already had a C: drive.