Windows 10: Drive corruption after swapping hardware - how did it happen?

My goose is already pretty much cooked through and through with this so I'm beyond the support stage. All the data was corrupted in this process and recovery software isn't helping, I'm just wondering what went so wrong.


Earlier this month I decided to make the jump from Intel to AMD and I only recently put everything together. Windows is BSOD'ing like crazy and after confirming it wasn't my hardware that was the problem, I attempted to look through the software. The blue screens start happening quicker and quicker until I'm simply left pre-login screen with the loading indicator spinning.


I jump into the recovery environment and working through CMD I discovery that my EFI partition is gone, that's why bootrec wasn't working. I mull over trying to fix the problem for a day and attempt to fix the EFI partition but CMD isn't giving me any success. Feeling royally screwed, I decided to reinstall windows, I could use a good spring cleaning anyways.


After the reinstall, things seem stable so I install all the needed drivers and everything seems fine. A half-hour goes by and I'm setting up the new install when I get a driver power BSOD. I restart, uninstall, and reinstall the drivers figuring that something didn't install correctly. I've had this happen before so I wasn't unfamiliar with the issue. I work for an hour and things seem fine. I go to My Computer and notice that only the NVME I installed Windows on is showing up. Ah, that's right, I unplugged my hard drives before reinstalling Windows so I wouldn't accidentally format them in the install process. I shut down, plug them in, and restart.


Disk Management is promptly brought up and all my hard drives are showing up as unallocated. With MiniTool Partition Wizzard, I recover the drives and assign them a letter. Everything is on them and seems fine so I restart the computer again, now everything is not fine again. The blue screens are back, my drives are unallocated again, and after some searching, I find out that it's the storage drivers that are the problem. I uninstall those and reinstall generics in their place and restart.


I bring up My Computer again and my drives are missing once more. Disk Management shows the hard drives now as all RAW partitions. I do another partition recovery and while two of the three drives recover successfully, one wasn't so lucky. After attempting a data recovery with both MiniTool and EaseUS, I'm finding names and folders of what used to be on the drive, but the gigabytes of video recordings that used to be present on the drive, are now only megabytes of corrupt data.


The same thing would also happen with a backup SSD but that only contained images of my previous Windows installation, no big loss since nothing important was on it.


Between the three hard drives, two SSD's, and an NVME drive, I got seven terabytes of storage space for a reason, so stuff like this doesn't happen. Here I am though, wondering why this happened.


I'd much rather not go the NAS route, but I think that's what I'll have to do from now on.

:)

 

Cloning to SSD then swapping drive letters


@SamHobbs
What you want done is very simple and can be done in short period of time. Here's my suggestion:
There's 2 modes that Windows can be installed: UEFI and the old legacy MBR. Open Disk Management, look at the disk where your C drive is, if there's a

1. EFI System Partition, your Windows was installed using UEFI.
2. System Reserved partition, your Windows was installed using MBR

Next, Connect your SSD to an available Sata port (no need to format or do anything). Download: Macrium Reflect Free . Install and run. Follow the steps below:

1. From Macrium, click on image this disk under your C drive and save it to either an Internal or External Drive. This will create a single backup image of the whole disk containing your C drive.
2. Again, from Macrium, click on Restore tab and select the image created from step 1, Select your SSD as the destination drive, click Next->Finish
3. Exit Macrium. If your Windows was installed using MBR, Open disk management and make sure the SSD is marked "Active" else go to next step.
4. Shutdown your PC. Disconnect the HD containing Windows C drive then connect your SSD to it.
5. Reboot. Your PC should boot and the Windows should have C as the drive letter.

NOTE: The procedure above is to backup your Windows to an image file then copy it back to the SSD. This ensures proper cluster size aligment for the SSD. In addition, Macrium also perform Trimming for the SSD. This is more preferable than cloning.

 

Building Again

I just tried to swap the hard drive for the one you suggested keakar but i purchased rush processing so its already in step 3... *Big Grin

 

Programs not working


In post 26 there were steps listed to fix the operating system corruption.
Are you able to follow them?
In post 29 was the suggested dism repair command.