I recently helped my dad upgrade his desktop from an HDD to a 512GB SSD by cloning the drive using DiskGenius. I followed the OS migration process, set the destination, and used WinPE for cloning. After restarting and switching the boot order in BIOS to prioritize the SSD, everything seemed okay. It booted up, but not that fast, and when I tried to sign into the main account, it got stuck on the loading screen. However, I was able to log into the other accounts, albeit slowly, and then it let me back into the main account without issue. Task Manager shows most activity on the SSD, but sometimes it references the HDD too, especially after startup. Recently, during a restart, it went into a repair loop for both the C and D drives for about 10 minutes. I feel bad about this situation since it's my dad's computer. Anyone have any ideas on what might be wrong or how to fix it without doing a fresh install?
3 Answers
Are both drives running Windows? It sounds like your system is still confused with having two operating systems. Verifying that the BIOS is set to boot from the SSD alone might help. If you cloned the HDD, Windows could be trying to pull resources from both, which can slow things down.
If it’s still acting weird, consider the possibility of a bad SSD. Run some diagnostics with tools that can read S.M.A.R.T. data to see the health of your drives. If the SSD is faulty, you'll need to get that sorted before things can stabilize.
Sounds like there might have been an issue during the cloning process. It’s possible that the SSD isn’t functioning perfectly or that the cloned data isn’t all there. You could check the S.M.A.R.T. status of both drives to see if there are any warning signs. If everything checks out but the issue persists, it might be worth trying to reinstall Windows on the SSD since it might be a bad clone. Just remember that you still have your data on the HDD as a backup!
But if you reinstall, isn’t everything on the HDD still safe? Just back it up first, right?
Exactly! If both drives have Windows, it might be causing conflicts. Booting from just the SSD could solve that.