Migrating my Windows Boot Drive before it's too late...

Category: Tech Tutorial

Tags: backupcloningdrivehardwaresoftware

Entities: BrettCrucialDa Vinci ResolveDisc Plus MoDisk GeniusSamsung 980 ProSynology

Transcript

00:00

Surprisingly, I've never had to deal with a dying drive in my personal machine. Knock on wood.

But it's actually too late for that because my boot NVME drive in my main Windows workstation is on its way out. So, today I'm going to show you how I discovered the issue, what I did to resolve it, and

00:17

how it all worked out. Spoiler alert, it's a pretty smooth process.

So, this video is probably going to be like 5 minutes long. So, let's start with the problem.

My NVME drive has bad sectors, which usually means it's a ticking time bomb for total drive failure. Now, you'd

00:32

expect that I got this big old Windows notification that was like, "Hey, bro. Um, you need to replace this drive." But that's not what happened at all.

You see, I use Synology to back up all my personal machines through their active backup for business app. Can't recommend

00:47

this enough, by the way, but I noticed that I was getting emails that the backup for my main PC was failing. Now, this can happen for a few reasons, like if you lose connectivity or if you mess with your network settings, both of which I stupidly impose on myself all the time.

So, when I saw this, I wasn't

01:04

too concerned, but it became a normal thing to where it was failing every single time. I finally went into the logs to see what was going on, and I saw the error code 22, which means that the source location you're trying to back up has bad sectors.

I went to confirm this

01:20

in the Windows event viewer and sure enough there were all those beautiful fire engine red errors. My first thought was, "Huh, I'm hungry." But after that, I was like, "Okay, I should probably replace this drive." Normally, I'd just get a new drive and reinstall a clean

01:35

version of Windows, which is honestly what I recommend to most people. However, I work in Da Vinci Resolve, and as far as I know, there isn't a good way to back up and restore all your settings, plugins, and scripts.

Last time I wiped my machine, I had to manually go in and transfer over all the

01:52

resolve folders from all over the place from various different locations from my previous backups. And it still wasn't a onetoone transfer.

So, this time I want to just be able to pop in a new drive and have it working like nothing ever happened except for less errors. Speaking of drives, here's a sponsor.

02:09

This video is sponsored by Sharing their Disc Plus Mo. NVME enclosure.

Look, I know you've seen an NVME enclosure before, but this one's different. I was paid to talk about this one.

Jokes aside, this thing is dope. It's only 0.24 in thick, which makes it super easy

02:24

to carry around. It's all aluminum, which makes it durable, and with the included thermal pads, it provides better heat dissipation.

The Dis Plus uses a USBC 3.2 Gen 2, aka a 10 GB per second connection, which gives you a max transfer rate of,50 megabytes per second. Oh, and the

02:40

cable is built in, so you don't have to worry about losing it. At this point, you're thinking, "Wow, Brett, I'm already at half mast." But wait, there's more.

If you want to use this with a phone or a laptop, the Disc Plus can magnetically attach using the included magnetic pad or magnetic rings for non-magnetic devices. But there's more.

02:56

We have USB power pass through, which gives us up to 100 watts, so you can charge your device and access the storage with only a single port. So, go ahead and use my discount code to pick up a charge disc plus and get up to four terabytes of mobile storage using the link down in the description below.

03:12

There are honestly a few ways to do this, but the one I went with was to use a software called Disc Genius, which has two things going for it. It's free and it works.

And this isn't sponsored in any way. This is legitimately how I fixed this issue just the other day.

So, what this genius is going to do is

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basically create an exact clone of your boot drive to another device, which will give us the outcome we were looking for. And the first step is to actually get a new drive and connect it to your machine.

The drive that was failing was a two TBTE Samsung 980 Pro, which is probably just unlucky as those are some

03:45

quality drives. Honestly, I probably would have just bought another if I didn't already have a two TB Crucial drive just sitting around vibing.

You can connect this to your machine however you want, but I used uh this guy. Look familiar?

If it doesn't, that means you skipped the ad and now I'm poor. Thanks.

04:03

Once connected to my machine, I was able to go back into Dis Genius and start the OS migration process. Well, I actually had to clear the drive first to ensure it was empty, but then I could kick it off.

It gives you a visual of what the new drive will look like compared to the old one. And since these were the same

04:19

size, it was identical. It gives you the option of doing a restart to run the process or to do it while the machine is running with snapshots.

I don't know that one is better than the other, but I went with the snapshot method just so that I could get some screen caps of the entire process running. The process said

04:34

it was going to take around 25 minutes, which isn't bad. And after that much time had passed, it was completed with no errors.

It did, however, alert me that the old drive has bad sectors, which was nice. Windows.

I know people hate notifications and stuff, but I feel like if my drive is dying, a little,

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hey, you might want to check this out would be nice. Just saying.

The last step was to simply replace my old drive with the new one, which in my case required me to remove my totally not compensating for anything GPU since it was blocking the M.2 slots. All that was

05:06

left was to turn it on and hope that the machine booted up normally with no issues. To be fair, I was expecting a few little quirks and to do some basic troubleshooting, but it just worked.

My machine looked and felt just as if I hit the restart button. I did notice that I

05:21

had to resign in to a bunch of apps, but that was kind of it. The two things I wanted to ensure was that Da Vinci was all good and that I could back up to my Synology server.

Fortunately, Da Vinci fired right up and worked just as expected. And oh, um, yeah, super glad

05:37

Logitech G Suite was working. Thanks for making your presence known.

Then I went to check my Synology process and noticed that the backup was already underway. After a few minutes, I was happy to see that the backup had successfully completed.

Neat. And well, that's basically it.

Like I mentioned, there

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are quite a few ways to do this, like using an actual hardware device for cloning drives or other softwares that basically do the same thing. And in the event of my drive just straight up dying, I could have always done a full restore from my Synology backups from before a time.

and the drive crapped

06:09

out. This is just the way I did it and it worked.

So, I wanted to share that experience with you. Okay, that's all I got.

Thanks. Bye.

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