Windows 10, bad blocks, ddrescued to new disk using Linux, boot fails

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

My wife's Windows 10 machine (a Dell Inspiron 530) had an old 500G SATA disk in it. It developed bad blocks, so rather than wait for it to die and have to buy a new copy of Windows 10 (it was upgraded from Windows 7 some time ago), I decided it'd make sense to get a replacement disk and transfer the files to the new disk.

The new disk is a 2T drive - this machine's BIOS can only boot from MBR partitioning, not GPT, which means 2T is as big as we're going to get for a boot drive.

Anyway, the old 500G had two Windows partitions - a little 10G partition for boot files, and the rest of the disk for the rest (plus a Linux - more on that below).

I ddrescued both Windows partitions to a disk with some spare space in a USB disk enclosure, then transferred those files to another machine via the network. I also dd'd the first 446 bytes of the old drive in case I needed it later. However, it was probably just set up by grub2, as the old 500G disk was dual-boot Windows 10 and Linux Mint 19.1.

ddrescue had some retries, but it seems to have been able to read the troublesome blocks, based on my newbie reading of its output.

She wants to get rid of Linux Mint 19.1, and have only Windows 10 now. She claims Mint is "too complicated", and I disagree, but it's her machine and hence her decision.

Anyway, after dd'ing the two partitions to the new 2T disk, I ntfsresize'd the larger partition to make it nearly 2T (minus just the 10G partition for booting).

Up until now, things have gone pretty smoothly, other than the fact that ntfsresize wanted me to chkdsk the filesystem and reboot windows twice before ntfsresize would do its thing.

Anyway, when I try to boot from the new 2T disk, the BIOS claims no bootable drive is found. I booted into a gparted live rescue disk and toggled the boot flag on the 10G partition of the new 2T drive, but it didn't help - same error from the BIOS.

I then tried dd'ing FreeBSD's "booteasy" MBR program to the 1st 446 bytes of the new 2T disk on /dev/sdb. It's a pretty minimalist MBR program, its only bells and whistles being the ability to remember what partition you booted from last time and the ability to boot from a second drive if so desired. Booteasy is clearly loading and asking what partition I want to boot from, however if I pick the 10G partition, booting just hangs.

If I let booteasy engage and use it to select the gparted-containing USB thumb drive, it can boot from gparted live. So booteasy can't be all bad on this machine.

I'd be fine with replacing booteasy with something else; I just want the system to boot. I'd rather avoid buying another copy of Windows though (we have a licensed copy of Windows 7 somewhere, but I don't think we can upgrade it to Windows 10 for free anymore).

What do I need to do to get Windows booting from this new 2T disk?

Thanks!