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STRANGE DRIVE CLONING QUESTION


RDSII64

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RDSII64

My emby server won't boot. The only thing I know right now is if I try to boot from a different drive, it works as it should.  Assuming the drive itself isn't the problem, once I clone it to another drive

all should be well.  Now is where it gets dicey. How do I use a second computer to clone my boot drive to a new one.

I'm hoping is as simple as installing the software on the secondary computer, putting the drives into external enclosures, attach them, and follow the directions. 

Please advise.

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Gilgamesh_48
30 minutes ago, Luke said:

@Gilgamesh_48 @rbjtech

Have you tried this before?

To be honest I have to admit that I have never attempted to "clone" a boot drive so I have little knowledge about that.
However I have at least 6 times made a new install of Windows and a new Emby install where I moved the external hard drives I use to the new computer and installed Emby on the new computer. I tried a couple of times to migrate the database and once it actually worked correctly but I decided that simply doing a clean install is the easiest and that is made easier by storing support data with the media.

If you need watched status I can recommend Trakt. There are other ways but Trakt is the easiest I have found.

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pwhodges

The easiest way to do this is using Acronis TrueImage software, plugging the new disk into a spare disk port on the motherboard (or using a USB carrier).  This costs money, but you may find free equivalents; however, note that many SSDs are sold with a licence to use TrueImage specifically for cloning onto them (I've no idea if any hard disks include such a licence).

Paul

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rbjtech
10 hours ago, RDSII64 said:

My emby server won't boot. The only thing I know right now is if I try to boot from a different drive, it works as it should.  Assuming the drive itself isn't the problem, once I clone it to another drive

all should be well.  Now is where it gets dicey. How do I use a second computer to clone my boot drive to a new one.

I'm hoping is as simple as installing the software on the secondary computer, putting the drives into external enclosures, attach them, and follow the directions. 

Please advise.

So if a new disk boots ok, then you either have just a bad boot configuration on the disk, or the disk itself is bad.

There is no point in cloning a bad disk or bad boot config - so the first thing I would do is use a good disk to boot - and then use that to check the health on the 'bad' disk.   Is the file system ok - can you see and read files from it ok ?  if yes, then it may be a case of simply fixing the boot sector on the original disk. 

If it has valued data on it - then before doing anything and while it is 'online' , I would copy the data from it to the 'good' disk.

If you do simply wanna copy one disk to the other, then as per your original post, plug in both disks, boot with the cloning s/w (usually via USB as you can't boot into an OS to 'clone' itself) then choose to clone one disk to the other. 

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