[GTALUG] War Story

Sun Jan 21 23:02:39 EST 2018

A diegesis about my experience moving Windows 10 from a 512GB SSD to a 
1TB SSD.

I had EaseUS Todo Backup which promised to do the job for me. Alas when 
I inserted the 1TB disk into my SATA USB connector Windows 10 would not 
recognize the disk. So I installed the 1TB disk into my laptop and put 
the 512GB system disk into the adapter. All was good. The BIOS 
recognized both disks. I then used a bootable USB stick to load up ToDo 
Easeus Backup. It refused to clone the 512GB drive! What the $%@!. It 
said the disks were offline. :(

Ok, I had enough of wasting time on Windows software. I had a bootable 
USB stick with Linux handy and loaded that on my laptop. Linux 
recognized both drives just fine. Thinking like a Linux sysadmin, I used 
dd command to copy sector for sector from the 512GB drive to the 1GB 
drive. It completed without an error.

Now the moment of truth. I tried to boot Windows. Windows immediately 
went into recovery mode and wiped out the GPT entries for the first two 
partitions! Needless to say Windows did not boot.

This is now 5am and I resolved not to be defeated by Microsoft! So using 
another laptop I created a bootable USB stick with Clonezilla; a Debian 
based distribution which promises to clone drives and partitions. I then 
booted my Windows laptop into Clonezilla. As expected it recognized both 
drives. I selected device to device copy with all of the default 
parameters. After 50 minutes Clonezilla announced the copy to be 
completed.

Now the moment of truth. I booted Windows.....and it worked! I now had 
Windows 10 running off of my 1TB drive. Alas I still had one problem. 
Clonezilla was so thorough that it copied the disk geometry in the GPT 
table from the 512GB disk to the 1TB disk. Windows, being as smart as it 
is, thought the 1TB disk was only 512GB in size. Even though I should 
have known better, I tried EaseUS Partition Master to fix the GPT table. 
It said there was no problem with the disk$#%#$#@%!

Back to Linux I went. I booted the Linux live USB again. I started 
gParted which immediately notified me that the GPT table was reporting 
the wrong size of the disk. Being a helpful Linux utility it offered to 
fix the problem for me. I accepted.

Back to Windows 10 I went. This time Windows said the disk was 1TB in 
size. Yay! Now, since I use Bitlocker on my drives, when I went to 
resize the C drive to occupy the rest of the disk, both Windows 10 and 
EaseUS Partition Master said it couldn't be done. What the ^$#@! I've 
done this in Linux many times. Resizing encrypted partitions is not 
trivial but certainly doable in Linux.

So after Googling I realized I had to first turn Bitlocker off. When I 
tried to do this, Windows 10 notified me it had to decrypt every file on 
my drives which could take hours. What the %$#@!

I left it running and finally went to bed for four hours. When I got up, 
Windows 10 said Bitlocker was turned off. I then tried EaseUS Partition 
Master to resize the C drive. It took less than a second for it do so.

I now have my 1TB SSD as my main disk in my laptop. Thank goodness Linux 
was available to save the day er night.A diegesis about my experience 
moving Windows 10 from a 512GB SSD to a 1TB SSD.