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PHILIP MACAFEE
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Need to duplicate dying drive with Paragon Disk Manager 12

So I have a Windows 10  home edition laptop with  UEFI that has a disk going bad. I was able to get Paragon Disk Manager 12 to create an archive of the disk a week ago. But when I attempt to migrate the OS to a new drive, the disk is now far enough gone to not complete the boot partition.
The failing drive still boots in the laptop but I get a pop up window warning of a failing disk. I have a copy of every type of Windows 10 except the home edition and everything i read says the any repair or restore efforts must be made with the edition and version that was installed on the machine.

Is there a way to restore the archive to the new drive and run a utility to make it bootable? Can I use the recovery or Push button partitions in some fashion? I am trying to avoid a clean install. Can I sure another utility like Easy BCD to create a boot sector after restoring all the partitions from the archive? I can use my home computer to put the old and new drive on and then run Paragon or Easy BCD to make the replacement drive bootable. Once back up, then I will upgrade the drive to 10 Pro.
InstallationSystem UtilitiesDisaster RecoveryWindows OS

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nobus

8/22/2022 - Mon
David Johnson, CD

The easiest method is install Windows 10 on the destination computer.
Now copy over the os partition from the failing disk to the new disk, once completed attempt to boot the OLD OS from the new disk.. If it doesn't boot then that means that the disk id has changed and the bcd can't find the disk with that signature.

Boot from ANY Windows 7+ disk, select repair, then command prompt
type diskpart
list vol
see and remember which drive letter is the OS
exit (to exit diskpart)
bcdboot x:\windows (replace X: with the drive letter you saw from diskpart
reboot and you should be good to go.

FYI it doesn't have to be the same version home/pro/Enterprise/Education or even Windows 10 windows 7 or newer knows about the bcdstore and how to work with it.
PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
David, Perhaps there is a shortcut here.
Previously I had copied all 7 partitions from the Paragon Archive:
Recovery 400 MB
ESP 300 MB
Local Disk 128 MB
Acer Laptop 694.9 GB
Local Disk 785 MB
Local Disk 350 MB
Push Button Reset 11.7 GM

While I was posting my problem, I was running Paragon 12's  Migrate OS wizard between the old and new drives on a separate machine. It got to 88% done and then gagged for over an hour at that point, probably stuck on a bad sector. I left for work and when I came home this evening, it showed 100% complete and had deleted all 7 of the partitions I had copied over earlier and it had one partition for 694 GB. I tried booting off my other machine with no luck and then assigned a drive letter to it and then tried to boot it with no luck. But I could see that the wizard had moved all my files over with the OS. Tomorrow I will install it into the laptop and see if it boots and then run the repair as you instructed. If no joy, then I will install a clean WIN 10. When you say to move the old boot partition over, which one of the above partitions should I move?
Really appreciate the help.
David Johnson, CD

try the following boot from a install disk select repair command prompt
diskpart
list vol
exit
bootsect /nt60 /SYS driveletter from diskpart
bcdboot x:\windows replace X with the drive letter from the value from diskpart list vol
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nobus

since the failing drive still boots - you should have no booting problem after cloning
you can try repairing the disk drive with HDDRegenerator -it repaired many drives for me - not free  :   http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html
rindi

When you installed Paragon's tool, it should also have installed a tool called "Paragon Recovery Media Builder Wizard". With this tool you create a bootable CD or USB stick with Paragon's tool on it.

With that CD or DVD you would boot your PC, then run the paragon tool to restore the backup image you made previously to your new HD. Once you have restored that image, your PC should be able to boot into the new disk without any issues (provided you backed up correctly in the first place, including all the partitions of your original disk, particularly the small recovery partition Windows 10 uses).

If you failed to use that wizard to create the bootable CD or USB stick, install paragon to another PC and do that now.
PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
Ok, so I copied the archive onto the new disk and still will not boot. Did the bcdboot stuff that was recommended. So I get an error
"Media test failure check cable"
I can boot from a Windows install disk and from a Paragon boot disk and run most utilities. Windows says that it cannot repair the boot files.
When I run the Paragon Repair disk and go to Boot Corrector/repair windows operating system, the utility finds:
"Unknown Operating System (Destination: Disk 0, Partition 3; Status: Bootable"
Below that is a link to "Correct Boot Parameters" and then below that:
"Current values: Registry volume letter: Unknown; Partition ID 1"
Could i have the registry pointing to the wrong partition?
Not sure how to use the "Correct Boot Parameters", when I click on it there is a field for "Please use new registry volume letter" but that field is grayed out.
Below that is an option to enter an ID manually and I am tempted to put in 3 as it sees an operating system in partition 3.
Am I on the right track?
Also ran checkdisk that found some errors. SFC /scannow  with offline parameters but could not get it to complete.
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David Johnson, CD

please send a picture or text of 'diskpart' list disk and list vol

DISKPART> list vol

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 0     K                       DVD-ROM         0 B  No Media
  Volume 1     C   Windows 10   NTFS   Partition    361 GB  Healthy    Boot
  Volume 2     Z   Server 2016  NTFS   Partition    114 GB  Healthy
  Volume 3         Recovery     NTFS   Partition    450 MB  Healthy    Hidden
  Volume 4                      FAT32  Partition     99 MB  Healthy    System
  Volume 5                      NTFS   Partition    454 MB  Healthy    Hidden
  Volume 6     D   Storage      NTFS   Partition     14 TB  Healthy

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
* Disk 5    Online          476 GB  1024 KB        *
  Disk 8    Online           14 TB      0 B        *
rindi

No. You need to create the paragon booting CD so you can restore the backup you made to the new disk. Just copying the archive over is not the same thing as restoring it.
PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
RINDI; i used the Migrate OS wizard in Paragon Hard Disk Manager, should that not have moved the entire disk OS and boot parameteres to the new drive?

David Johnson, when I run diskpart> list vol and diskpart> list disk nothing returns, it just goes back to a dos prompt.
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David Johnson, CD

you run diskpart
from within diskpart you type
list volume
list disk
you then type exit to exit diskpart and return to the command prompt.
rindi

You said you created an archive using Paragon. Before you can use that archive, you must restore it to your your new disk, again using paragon.
PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
Sorry, I was running the command wrong. Attached is a screenshot from my Iphone

diskpart list vol and list disk
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PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
David; what can you tell from the screenshot?
David Johnson, CD

diskpart
sel disk 0
list par
PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
Disk 0 is of course the Paragon boot recovery disk. But i think I might have made a mistake here, assuming that a recovery disk put together on another machine would work.
Oops, the recovery disk was put together several years ago for another recovery effort and an earlier OS like win 7 or win server. Here is a shot of the partition on the recovery disk:
IMG_1796.JPG
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PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
Should I make a new Paragon recovery disk from a machine that has the same OS?
PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
Also, if I use the Win10 install disk, should that one not do the job?
PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
I meant to say, if I use the Win 10 install disk for repair, should that not repair the boot error?
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nobus

p=acafee - be precise with the terms  you use
in your image ther is no disk 0 -but there is VOLUME 0 that is not the same
what recovery disk did you make?  for doing a factory restore?
if you mean a paragon BOOT disk - that you can make on any other system - it is meant to be used on different systems

>>  if I use the Win 10 install disk for repair, should that not repair the boot error?   <<  that is possible; but it does not repair a failing drive

for that , you need the software i mentioned above
PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
There seems to be a disk 0 in the photo that I posted.
disk0.png
nobus

well yes, since it's the onlt drive connected
i thought you meant the volume - if not, my bad
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David Johnson, CD

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PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
Yes, I became convinced I had to take the longer road.
The new drive was installed in the laptop, so I used the paragon boot disk to remove all partitions and am now finishing up a new Win 10 Enterprise install. Once I have Win installed I will look at the partition setup and ask for some more details of restoring the OS partition.
PHILIP MACAFEE

ASKER
OK, Win 10 Enterprise installed. Disk manager shows 2 partitions.
System Reserved 500MB
C: 698.15 GB
Do I use the Paragon to deleted the C: partition and then copy over the old C partition?
David Johnson, CD

Yes.
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PHILIP MACAFEE

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So I deleted the c: partition and copied over the c: partition from the archive.
Windows said the bootmgr was corrupted, so I put the win 10 disk back in and set it for repair.
It said "Repairing Disk Errors. This might take over an hour to complete. It rebooted and gave the same error about bootmgr being corrupted, so I repeated the process and it said "attempting repairs", rebooted fine. It took some time to come up but I now can work with my older system. Thank you very much. I am sure that there are some parts of the partition not in good health because of the failing drive that the arhive was made from. Not sure whether to run checkdisk, SFC, or just try to upgrade with the WIN 10 enterprise disk.
nobus

you can run sfc, or DISM
 Open cmd.exe with Run as Administrator.
 DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /Scanhealth (takes 15 - 20 minutes).
 DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /Restorehealth (takes 15 - 20 minutes).