New SSD boots but...

[lakedude]

My MSI GT70 came with a mechanical hard drive which is being replaceed by a smaller SSD. The HD was cloned to the SSD using Macrum and the SSD works fine, except the repair options at f3 do not work. The SSD boots and runs perfectly for normal operation. I had been using f3 at startup to make changes to the BIOS but that does not work. Repair options error out as well. Of course the new drive is not an exact copy because it is smaller. Differences are as follows:

1) C: has been shrunk to fit
2) D: Data partition omitted
3) A 100MB unformatted partition omitted
4) A recovery partition at the end of the drive was resized and is necessarily starting earlier (SSD is smaller).

Ideas as to the cause?

 

[lakedude]

2) is D colon...

 

[Burpo]

A bit dated but may provide clues/answers..

"There may be a number of situations where you need to recover your notebook, but recovery fails.

1) If you have accidentally (or intentionally) removed the hidden BIOS_RVY partition from your notebook's hard drive.
2) Your hard drive has been corrupted, and the BIOS_RVY partition is damaged.
3) You have replaced the hard drive because it has failed."

https://forum-en.msi.com/faq/article/reinstalling-windows-when-recovery-fails

 

[Ketchup]

Yeah, I think you unintentionally removed the BIOS_RVY, which is causing these options not to work. I suppose you could just replace the SSD with the original drive when you need these features. Or buy a larger SSD.

 

[gammaray]

just out of curiosity, was the bios set to ahci for your ssd?

 

[lakedude]

Yes, I believe the bios was set for AHCI. The only reason I know is because I was poking around in the BIOS in a futile attempt to find one set of settings that would allow booting from both HD and CD depending on if there is a disk in the optical, like on older computers. Instead I've been toggling the Bios between legacy and UEFI to accomplish the same thing. I've not been able to boot from optical under UEFI and I've not been able to boot from the hard drive under legacy but that is another issue.

If it didn't take an hour and half to clone the hard drive I'd love to play around with different configurations and learn from the resulting behavior. Win95 would clone in like 5 or 10 minutes back in the day.

If I do re-clone what are the suggestions? Put that 100MB unformatted partition back in? Do not shrink that last partition? There is no way I'm buying a huge SSD just to solve this problem. If it comes to it I'll just put the original HD back in.

 

[gammaray]

well, if it was up to me, i would do a fresh install, i think a lot of useless data is being transferred from an existing HD to an ssd. Besides, installing windows on a ssd takes like 20 minutes. i know what you gonna say, it will take me 3 days to install the rest of my softwares. well, depends on your spare time. i think its worth it.

your HD was installed under legacy probably? but new mobos usually select uefi by default when installing a new os.

but if you gonna re-clone, an expert using macrium should answer you. good luck!

 

[lakedude]

Interesting, I looked around hoping to find an install disk and found none, however I did find a mount for a second hard drive which will come in handy.

Also MSI has a Burn Recovery option that evidently makes restore disks so it looks like starting from scratch is an option.

 

[lakedude]

The SSD has 4 partitions currently:

1) WinRE tools, 228MB used out of 600, unmoved, not re-sized.
2) System, FAT 32, 47 MB used out of 100, not re-sized, possibly moved not sure
3) OS_install (C, moved and shrunk
4) BIOS_RVY, 16MB used out of 18, moved and slightly shrunk

So that BIOS_RVY is there but it is not where it was originally for sure...

There was 100MB of unformatted space on the original drive and a data partition that I didn't copy over.

 

[lakedude]

It looks like the partition I omitted was the MSR which evidently goes between the "System" and the OS partitions...

Wiki has this to say about that:

"However, the MSR partition is not actually required for Windows to work, so can be deleted[citation needed]; though doing this can possibly break the boot-loader"

 

[corkyg]

What Macrium did was an imperfect clone job - in fact, it was not a cloning. Good cloneware allows proportional cloning between drives of different sizes. Nothing is omitted. However, it all must fit or it can't be cloned.

 

[lakedude]

Well I manually omitted the MSR. Interesting learning experience.