I've been handed two Asus laptops to poke around in. They're twins, and the Win8 installations had been abused so they needed a clean up. One went swimmingling, just fired it up removed all the crud, gave it a sweep with ccleaner, AVG and bits and pieces, good to go...

The evil twin however is obdurately obstinate. It complains incessantly it can't talk to the installation service... scratch head, never seen that before... enable and fire up the admin account... same... and the installer service is in fact running, its also throwing some weirdo error at win startup arco or some such... After messing around with that for a while. I decided bugger it, I'll just reset the whole thing and be done with it. This is where it gets interesting... If you go the factory reset option is reports there's a missing partition and its unable to continue. If you go the other way and ask for a system repair, it still reports a partition problem, but not one thats missing. If you compare the partition table on both devices they look the same. At the moment I think, there's either some kind of partition corruption,
or somehow the system partition is locked.

Two things come to mind at the moment, do a system backup of the functioning one and restore it to the dud, or clone the fully functional SSD and use that. Either of these ought to get around the problem, but neither one actually tells
me whats going on... any takers on an idea?

Spec


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Re: Todays trick question
By: Spectre to Nobody on Sat Jul 18 2020 10:25 pm

Two things come to mind at the moment, do a system backup of the functioning one and restore it to the dud, or clone the fully functional SSD and use tha Either of these ought to get around the problem, but neither one actually te me whats going on... any takers on an idea?

Windows is designed so you canç't transfer an install from a computer to the other. My bet is trying to clone won't work.

I'd boot System Rescue CD and use testdisk to check for partition table corruptiona, and check the consistency of the filesystems.

But really at that point you should be scrapping Windows and installing something else :-P

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On 20 Jul 2020, Arelor said the following...

Re: Todays trick question
By: Spectre to Nobody on Sat Jul 18 2020 10:25 pm

Two things come to mind at the moment, do a system backup of the functi one and restore it to the dud, or clone the fully functional SSD and us Either of these ought to get around the problem, but neither one actual me whats going on... any takers on an idea?

Windows is designed so you canç't transfer an install from a computer
to the other. My bet is trying to clone won't work.

I upgrades 2 systems last week, the only thing original was the SSD with Windows10. Both times It accepted the new hardware like nothing happened.

-=- Gary aka HSM -=-
-=TheFreeSpeak.com=-

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Re: Re: Todays trick question
By: HSM to Arelor on Mon Jul 20 2020 01:01 pm

I upgrades 2 systems last week, the only thing original was the SSD with Windows10. Both times It accepted the new hardware like nothing happened.

-=- Gary aka HSM -=-

Thenk things must hav changed a lot, because last time I tried with XP, changed motherboard forced you to buy a new Windows license

/

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Windows is designed so you canç't transfer an install from a
computer to the other. My bet is trying to clone won't work.

Normally I'd agree, you wouldn't want to try across disparate systems, as the drivers will be all over the place. However the two laptops for the transplant are twins. Model and spec wise....

I'd boot System Rescue CD and use testdisk to check for partition
table corruptiona, and check the consistency of the filesystems.

Well I does have any optical device :/ So that was out. BUT I did get a copy of the rescue partition so I had the tools handy.. which did can I just say F*CK all.... All said the same thing missing partition do not pass go.

Anyway turns out cloning does work, it can be a little tricky to get right though. After pfaffing about with all the winblows tools, I'd had to download softs originally to reset the user account password, I went back to the same looking for partition repair, and behold it offered to clone.

My first thought in clone, was do a block for block copy which went great, but when I tried to retore it, it wouldn't fit back on the SSD <boggle> I'm guessing something about physical disparity between two different sized devices with block sizes. I had to have it copy only used sectors and then it just went swimmingly.

But really at that point you should be scrapping Windows and
installing something else :-P

While on some level I can agree with this, its not mine, so that choice isn't in my hands. There was talk about trying to put win10 on it, I offered 7 in a pinch. Depends on what its used for though too. This is a lappy that belongs to a "church" gets used by any number of people... all of whom probably have no idea how it works and all have winblows at home.

Spec


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Thenk things must hav changed a lot, because last time I tried with XP, changed motherboard forced you to buy a new Windows license

Normally I'd expect something like that too, but I think to a large degree with keys going into BIOS it will stop, because everyone will end up with a key for the last version on win so long as they can figure out which one it is. :)

One of the reasons I expected my laptop swap to still work... same system going onto the same hardware...

Spec


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