I think my drive cloning made a mess of windows and I need to fix it

[Blindsay]

So when I originally built my machine I was using a 2TB HP EX950 as my boot drive and then I bought a 960GB Optane drive and I used clonezilla to copy from the HP to the Optane. The optane drive has been great. The only annoyance was when I boot i see both drives as an option because I never wiped the HP drive 

So now I am thinking of selling my optane and going back to just the HP. I was going to wipe the HP drive and clone the Optane back to the HP drive but as I was about to wipe the HP drive I saw this in disk management

 

If I am looking at that correct, when I did the original clone apparently it did not clone the EFI or recovery partitions, so I am assuming if I nuke the HP drive my system will no longer boot correct? That said I want to remove the Optane drive and go back to just the HP. Can I just copy (C:) to (D:) (are there any utilities i can use within windows that will make sure to grab all system and hidden files?), then yank the optane and be back on the HP drive with it exactly how my setup is now?

Thanks!

[Eighjan]

6 minutes ago, Blindsay said:

So when I originally built my machine I was using a 2TB HP EX950 as my boot drive and then I bought a 960GB Optane drive and I used clonezilla to copy from the HP to the Optane. The optane drive has been great. The only annoyance was when I boot i see both drives as an option because I never wiped the HP drive 

So now I am thinking of selling my optane and going back to just the HP. I was going to wipe the HP drive and clone the Optane back to the HP drive but as I was about to wipe the HP drive I saw this in disk management

 

If I am looking at that correct, when I did the original clone apparently it did not clone the EFI or recovery partitions, so I am assuming if I nuke the HP drive my system will no longer boot correct? That said I want to remove the Optane drive and go back to just the HP. Can I just copy (C:) to (D:) (are there any utilities i can use within windows that will make sure to grab all system and hidden files?), then yank the optane and be back on the HP drive with it exactly how my setup is now?

Thanks!

Having last cloned my old 250GB Samsung 840 to a 1TB WD Blue m.2 I found that after the cloning process it told me to DISCONNECT the old drive. as part of the reboot.

 

I'd suggest:  Shut down the machine & remove the old boot drive... then reboot the system.

[Blindsay]

4 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

Having last cloned my old 250GB Samsung 840 to a 1TB WD Blue m.2 I found that after the cloning process it told me to DISCONNECT the old drive. as part of the reboot.

 

I'd suggest:  Shut down the machine & remove the old boot drive... then reboot the system.

I did the cloning months ago, I need to go back to the HP drive so I need to clone the new data on the optane drive over to the HP drive. Also removing the drive is not an option unfortunately 

[ChrisLoudon]

Hi buddy,

 

If you want to go back to using your HP drive and get shot of your Optane drive, I would get a fresh Widows install media and start from there.

 

While I have had a pretty good success rate using various cloning utils in the past, there's really no substitute for booting from a Windows 10 USB stick, deleting all current partitions and starting from fresh. Obviously, if you've got a load of files on the drive you want to keep, you'll need to back them up before hand.

12 minutes ago, Blindsay said:

Can I just copy (C:) to (D:)

You can, but there will data in the Windows and Program Files folders that will likely be in use so expect problems.  

[WhitetailAni]

14 minutes ago, Blindsay said:

So when I originally built my machine I was using a 2TB HP EX950 as my boot drive and then I bought a 960GB Optane drive and I used clonezilla to copy from the HP to the Optane. The optane drive has been great. The only annoyance was when I boot i see both drives as an option because I never wiped the HP drive 

So now I am thinking of selling my optane and going back to just the HP. I was going to wipe the HP drive and clone the Optane back to the HP drive but as I was about to wipe the HP drive I saw this in disk management

 

If I am looking at that correct, when I did the original clone apparently it did not clone the EFI or recovery partitions, so I am assuming if I nuke the HP drive my system will no longer boot correct? That said I want to remove the Optane drive and go back to just the HP. Can I just copy (C:) to (D:) (are there any utilities i can use within windows that will make sure to grab all system and hidden files?), then yank the optane and be back on the HP drive with it exactly how my setup is now?

Thanks!

If you remove the HP drive you will not be able to boot from the Optane drive, correct.

That said, you can do this:
http://woshub.com/how-to-repair-deleted-efi-partition-in-windows-7/

I did this when the Windows installer threw Windows Boot Manager on a different SSD. It does say Windows 7 but it works for 10 as well. MAKE SURE that your drive is formatted as GPT not MBR though, and that you have a W10 USB not a W7 USB.

[Eighjan]

6 minutes ago, Blindsay said:

I did the cloning months ago, I need to go back to the HP drive so I need to clone the new data on the optane drive over to the HP drive. Also removing the drive is not an option unfortunately 

You may be best advised to backup YOUR data to an external drive & revert the machine with the OEM restore media.

 

FTR - what's the second 2TB drive?  Looks like there's two 2TB drives, Disk 0 & Disk 1.

[Blindsay]

5 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

If you remove the HP drive you will not be able to boot from the Optane drive, correct.

That said, you can do this:
http://woshub.com/how-to-repair-deleted-efi-partition-in-windows-7/

I did this when the Windows installer threw Windows Boot Manager on a different SSD. It does say Windows 7 but it works for 10 as well. MAKE SURE that your drive is formatted as GPT not MBR though, and that you have a W10 USB not a W7 USB.

Thanks for the info, the drive is GPT (I just double checked it).

Since the HP drive contains the EFI partition, right now If i yank the Optane drive out of the system in theory my system should just boot to the old HP drive and everything would be there minus anything that I added new since I cloned the drive.

Could I just copy the contents of my current (C:) to (D:) (as they are in the photo) and then that would let me boot with all the new files? (need something more than just a copy/paste via explorer though)

[WhitetailAni]

1 minute ago, Blindsay said:

Could I just copy the contents of my current (C:) to (D:) (as they are in the photo) and then that would let me boot with all the new files? (need something more than just a copy/paste via explorer though)

You could, but that defeats the point of using the Optane drive as your boot drive.

[Blindsay]

Just now, FakeKGB said:

You could, but that defeats the point of using the Optane drive as your boot drive.

Sorry if I was not clear, that is what I am trying to do. I want to sell my optane drive and just go back to the HP drive, I just want to make sure the HP drive has all of the newer content that is currently on the optane drive

[SithLordBaku]

46 minutes ago, Blindsay said:

So when I originally built my machine I was using a 2TB HP EX950 as my boot drive and then I bought a 960GB Optane drive and I used clonezilla to copy from the HP to the Optane. The optane drive has been great. The only annoyance was when I boot i see both drives as an option because I never wiped the HP drive 

So now I am thinking of selling my optane and going back to just the HP. I was going to wipe the HP drive and clone the Optane back to the HP drive but as I was about to wipe the HP drive I saw this in disk management

 

If I am looking at that correct, when I did the original clone apparently it did not clone the EFI or recovery partitions, so I am assuming if I nuke the HP drive my system will no longer boot correct? That said I want to remove the Optane drive and go back to just the HP. Can I just copy (C:) to (D:) (are there any utilities i can use within windows that will make sure to grab all system and hidden files?), then yank the optane and be back on the HP drive with it exactly how my setup is now?

Thanks!

You are correct, it did not copy the recovery and efi over.  I would try to clone just the partition to the smaller partition (assuming there enough space for the data), using minitools or a linux live distro,  once done, remove the optane, boot in recovery mode, select command prompt options, run bootrec.exe /fixmbr  bootrec.exe /fixboot   bootrec /rebuildbcd
this will rebuild the mbr, readd the efi boot files and rebuild bcd will show you all 'bootable' entries on the drives, select which one you want on the boot menu. 


 

[Blindsay]

Alright well if anyone runs into a similar issue I was able to get it working.

Ending up using EaseUS partition master to clone all the data from the optane drive back to the HP drive, Just the (C:) partition to (D:) partition making sure not to mess with the EFI or recovery partitions.

After just cloning the data I used BCDBoot to make the partition bootable and then BCDEdit to clean up the mess.

Successfully back on the HP drive and everything is exactly how it was. Now to sell the Optane drive.

Thanks everyone that responded