Windows is a wonderful OS when it works, but at times it really does piss me off. I recently brought a new SSD with the intent to clone over my current Windows drive and carry on as if nothing happened, just now with 1TB of space on C: instead of 256GB. Little did I know, this was going to be the start of a long, horrible process!
Failing to Cloning Windows
My new SDD arrived (along with 2 new HDDs that would replace some older storage drives in my PC that were starting to show signs of failing) arrived. I chose to use Macrium Reflect to clone my current Windows drive. It's free and very easy to use, minus a few basic hard drive limitations that I had to relearn. I had forgotten how much of a ball-ache moving, scaling, and merging partitions was, but it was all do-able. Long story short, this new clone of my drive simply would not boot. Choosing it as the primary drive via bios would indeed launch into it. Hell, even Windows acknowledged that it should be doing something. That something turned out to be infinite loading wheel next to a cursor over a black screen...
Googling on the subject, it appeared I wasn't alone. As many pointed out, while you'd think it should just be as simple as that, it rarely ever is. My line of thought quickly moved over to creating a disk image, and going from there. However this would have resulted in some specifics that I wasn't up for, mostly pertaining to 90% of my applications currently installed on a separate drive, and I wanted them all together back on C: drive.
Fresh Installation of Windows 10
My last resort suddenly became my only resort; reinstall Windows from scratch onto my new 1TB SSD. So I went to Microsoft's page to download the external disk media to allow me to reinstall Windows 10. The media had to be on a min 16GB external USB drive (or CD, not an option here though). The biggest memory stick I had was 8GB, so I decided to use my 2TB external drive. As part of the process of making this disk suitable for Windows to install from it had to format it, completely wiping my file backups. I took note of this, but didn't give it any further thought beyond that.
I Googled around to find what I should be expecting during this installation. I removed my current Windows drive, plugged in my 2TB external drive, and restarted. I manually told bios to boot from my 2TB ext. drive, starting the process to reinstall Windows. The process began. The screen went to black, then came up with Windows saying it was repairing itself. This was one of the ways I saw it happening when Googling around, so I left it. It took an hour or two, in which time I walked away and watched Tiger King on Netflix.
Upon my return, I saw that the loading bar had gone back down to a lower percentage than it was when I left it. I Googled and read that the process often failed first time causing a reboot, thus launching itself back into the same process. I left it, and this time sat with it while it got to the finishing stages to see if it said anything before rebooting. The process had finished repairing and was rebooting to continue into Windows OS.
As the system rebooted, I watched it try to relaunch into my ext.HDD to 'repair Windows' once again. I stopped it just before this stage, and restarted, this time telling bios to launch from my new 1TB SSD, the first drive on the list in my machine. It launched, had a think, and finally started up, all fresh and new!
Staring Back At Me
Once I was into my fresh install of Windows 10, it didn't take long for me to spot the difference. My 3TB main storage drive was called 'System F:', and had a 2nd copy of Windows 10 on it... Somehow Windows had installed on my new SSD, and then installed on my main data drive, overwriting everything on it! You can imagine the sudden butt-clenching experience of thinking, "nah, it's probably gotten mixed up, I'll just restart it and make sure all drives are plugged in correctly, etc". It's worth noting that I actually had some silly number of drives showing up now where Windows splits any drive it's on into 3 partitions.
The computer restarted, and indeed even Macrium Reflect agreed; my main data drive has been wiped to make way for a copy of Windows no one asked for. Not only that, but my main backup of that data on my 2TB ext. HDD had also been wiped to temporarily use it as a system repair drive. Sure, I had some shit floating around on a mix-up between Google Drive and Dropbox, but uploading always took so long I never bothered to properly back everything up that I would be sad to lose; and damn, if I wasn't suddenly realising how sad I really would be!
Moral of the Story is...
Always, always, always backup files and folders that are important to you! Not only should you back them up on another drive, you should have cloud versions backed up too. It's really not that much effort to do, and you never think you'll need it, but all it takes is for you to sit down at your PC one day and realise one of your drives has just stopped working. That's it, done; gone. In today's age things like photo albums are often held digitally; they sure were for me. I work as a 3D artist too, so all of my work is on my PC (I actually had this all backed up online thankfully). Then there's those things you do on spur of the moment that you wouldn't even think about until they are gone. I'm talking about screenshots from games! Essentially photos of memories taken from virtual worlds you've explored, often times with your friends and people from all over the world that you've had contact with now. They seem trivial, but in reality they can be just as important to keep as holiday photos! Take stock of everything you have on your computer and figure out what you would be sad to miss if something were to go wrong. Then make a contingency plan, and execute it now. Don't wait.
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