Need help with cloning a drive on a Leveno laptop.

gismo

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iGismo
Caution: Geeky technical stuff follows:

I recently bought an Ideapad Flex 4-1570 running Win 10 which came with a 256GB SSD and I happened to have a 1TB SSD that could replace the original one in the laptop. The new SSD came with some software ("data migration") to clone the contents of the old drive onto the new one. I ran that, swapped the drives, booted up the laptop, and everything looked good. The laptop (with no optical drive) has a feature involving a couple of hidden partitions that allows backup, restore, and recovery using a portion of the drive and/or a USB flashdrive and that no longer works. It's activated by pushing the "Novo button", a recessed PB on the side when the laptop is off. If I push the Novo button with the old drive attached via USB it works pretty much normally (haven't tried all the options but the ones I activated appear to work) but when I push the button without the old drive attached I get an error:

Recovery
Your PC/Device needs to be repaired
A required device isn't connected of can't be accessed.
Error code: 0xc0000225
You'll need to use recovery tools. If you don't have any installation media (like a disk or USB device), contact your PC administrator or PC/Device manufacturer.


Both the original and new drives have four partitions with the same names and as far as I can tell, nearly the same content but they appear to be in a different order. On the original the partitions look like this according to DiskPart:

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 System 260 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 Reserved 16 MB 261 MB
Partition 3 Primary 237 GB 277 MB
Partition 4 Recovery 1000 MB 237 GB

And the new drive looks like this:
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Recovery 1000 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 System 260 MB 1001 MB
Partition 3 Reserved 16 MB 1261 MB
Partition 4 Primary 930 GB 1277 MB

With both disks connected DiskPart lists the volumes (0-3 are the new disk) as :
Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 C Windows NTFS Partition 930 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 1 WINRE_DRV NTFS Partition 1000 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 2 SYSTEM_DRV FAT32 Partition 260 MB Healthy System
Volume 3 F Windows NTFS Partition 237 GB Healthy
Volume 4 SYSTEM_DRV FAT32 Partition 260 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 5 WINRE_DRV NTFS Partition 1000 MB Healthy Hidden

One thing I noticed is that "info" for Volume 2 on the new disk is "System" while the corresponding Volume 4 on the original is "Hidden", could that be the problem?

The new one was missing one file named "recovery.txt" length 0 in the root but copying that file from the original had no effect on my problem. I also copied the folders "Recovery" and "System Volume Information" from Volume 5 to Volume 2 but that didn't help either (they already existed on the new drive and were probably already identical). Volumes 2 and 5 have a folder named "$RECYCLE.BIN" and the contents are different but I can't see how that would affect the Novo functionality and their behavior WRT copying and moving is weird plus the folder on the old drive contains two subfolders with the same exact name: "Recucle Bin" which doesn't make any sense either. Finally the $RECYCLE.BIN folder in Volume 2 has two folders with long numeric names that begin with "S-1-5-21-" and I can't open them either although File Explorer says they're empty if I hover over the folder name.

Also I haven't been able to access Volume 2 on the new drive. I assigned it to drive letter E but if I try to open the drive in file explorer I get a permissions issue. The popup window says to click Continue to permanently get access but when I do that I get a second popup which says "You have been denied permission to access this folder." and "To gain access to this folder you will need to use the security tab". The text "security tab" is a link which opens the drive properties but there's no security tab there. The properties window for the corresponding drive/volume on the old disk doesn't have a "security" tab either but the properties for the two WINRE_DRV volumes do have that tab and I was able to gain access to the WINRE_DRV volume on the new drive by making changes there.

In the properties windows for the two SYSTEM_DRV volumes I can see that the used space is slightly different (23,838,720 bytes old vs 23,846,912 bytes new) but suspect that may due to differences in the sector sizes. The files and folders on the original SYSTEM_DRV volume are:

BOOT (folder)
-- BOOT.SDI (3,096KB file)
EFI (folder)
-- Boot (folder)
-- bootx64.efi (1,132 KB file)
-- Microsoft (folder)
-- Boot (folder)
-- five folders with country designations each containing one "memtest.efi.mui" file plus the folder named "en-US" contains two more files with extension .efi.mui
-- Recovery (folder)
--BCD (16KB file) contents are binary
--BCD.LOG (24KB file) contents are binary
--BCD.LOG1 (0KB file)
--BCD.LOG2 (0KB file)

For anyone who understands how any of this is supposed to work I have some questions:

1) How can I gain access to the folders and files on Volume 2 (on the new drive)?
2) How can there be two folders with the same name on Volume 5 (on the old drive)?
3) Why do I get a folder named "Recycle Bin" in the destination folder when I copy one of the supposedly empty folders from the $RECYCLE.BIN" folder in Volume 2 to a new folder on my C: drive and why does this copy attempt to create two files named "desktop.ini" in the destination folder (2nd file doesn't actually get created).
4) Does the order of the partitions matter?
5) How can I change the "info" for partition 2 from system to hidden and is that important?
6) Would I be better off starting over and using something like Acronus (I have an old version that will likely need to be updated to run on Win7)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I tried contacting Lenovo support via phone yesterday and got nowhere with the offshore help person. I will probably try sending this information to their online support but I'm not optimistic. They'll probably just tell me I'm not supposed to upgrade the SSD or some such nonsense.
 
I haven't worked on a Lenovo machine in a while, but the last time I did, I recall that one of the things that handy little Novo button could do was create a recovery image and boot media to a USB drive. So why not do that, and then "recover" from that drive to the SSD?

Rich
 
Jesse from 9 years ago would have definitely had the answer.

Today however ... uh ... Rich's suggestion sounds promising.
 
I haven't worked on a Lenovo machine in a while, but the last time I did, I recall that one of the things that handy little Novo button could do was create a recovery image and boot media to a USB drive. So why not do that, and then "recover" from that drive to the SSD?

Rich
I thought of doing that in the first place but as far as I can tell, the saved recovery image only includes the main bootable partition, not the recovery partitions themselves.
 
I thought of doing that in the first place but as far as I can tell, the saved recovery image only includes the main bootable partition, not the recovery partitions themselves.

That seems a bit odd. I can't remember the last time I did that sort of work, so I can't say for sure; but I seem to remember it creating a full image of all the partitions. It's hard to come up with a good reason why they'd do it any other way.

Does the Samsung software offer an option to create a bootable version? For whatever reason, it's probably not seeing the hidden partitions in Windows.

Or you could try Macrium. In my opinion, it surpassed Acronis in reliability years ago. It's the most trouble-free software I've ever owned. It just works, every time, reliably and without fanfare. I'm pretty sure the free version supports cloning.

You can also try cloning it using GParted on the Live Linux of your choice running off a bootable flash drive. And if all else fails, you can try using one of the bootable forensic copy tools to do a low-level, sector-by-sector copy. You'd have to resize the system partition manually after using the latter method, but that's no big deal.

One thing I wouldn't bother doing is trying to reverse-engineer Lenovo's recovery software. Maybe ten years ago the challenge would have excited me. Nowadays, not so much. I have better things to do.

Rich
 
Acronis may be your best option. You can use the free version (last time I tried) to create an exact copy/image of your hard drive. I've used this several times without any issues. This has worked for me when going from a smaller drive to a bigger drive. I don't know which version I have but I can find out if you want me to.
 
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