Strange Hard-drive installation problem.

I used to build systems and the last one I built lasted about 7 years. One day it had a coolant leak that I missed and eventually lead to a dead system. So I bought a brand new one as you can see in my system specs.

The very first day I had it, I removed the storage drives from the old computer and put one of them in the new computer. Booted up to windows 10 and immediately BSOD. Removing the hard drive allowed windows to boot normally. I have a USB device that also can clone drives. I went out and got a brand new 8TB drive and cloned my 5TB onto it. I put the brand new drive into the new computer, booted up and boom, BSOD. So I booted into Linux, which had no problem seeing the drive and deleted the data on the drive. Rebooted it into windows 10, and I'm currently using that drive without an issue. I also tried the other smaller 1TB drive and had the same exact issue. This tells me it's not a mechanical failure and the data can be read in Linux and have no issues on a windows 7 machine. I've also tried the old drives in other systems around the house that also run windows 10 to make sure it wasn't some other hard-ware issue. BSOD on all of them.

I will mention that the old drives were compressed under windows 7 and I've been wondering if that might have something to do with it. I want to also mention that I used my USB device to connect the drive to a chrome book. I was able to access the contents of the drive and even copy files to another drive. While I could probably go through the hassle of running a copy of windows 7 somehow and copying the files, I'd like to see if there's some way to actually get the drives to be read under windows 10. I would like to be able to move all the files off those drives and reformat them.

I would appreciate any insight.

Normally, I would recommend only cloning a drive if the new drive is going to be used in the same computer or another computer that is same model computer with the same hardware. Otherwise I would suggest one of the following two actions:

1) A clean install of Windows, followed by moving all the data files from old system to new new system.

2) A disk image back of old computer restored to new computer. Note that this is different from a plain clone of the drive as many disk imaging programs (Macrium Reflect is one example) have the ability to restore to a machine with dissimilar hardware by installing the correct base system drivers for that hardware.

That's the problem with a flat out clone - you could potentially have major issues if the hardware is different between the original and new system.

hsehestedt said:

1) A clean install of Windows, followed by moving all the data files from old system to new new system.

Brand new computer, fresh install of windows. Mechanical drive is just a data drive. OS is on a brand new SSD M.2 drive. The purpose of cloning to a new hard-drive was to eliminate the possibility that the hard drive hard-ware itself was bad. When installing the drive, I get BSOD as soon as windows loads. There isn't a way, through windows, to transfer the data.

hsehestedt said:

2) A disk image back of old computer restored to new computer. Note that this is different from a plain clone of the drive as many disk imaging programs (Macrium Reflect is one example) have the ability to restore to a machine with dissimilar hardware by installing the correct base system drivers for that hardware.

Something I thought of already. The old computer used 3 SSD's in a Raid 0/1 stripe array for the operating system. I had another drive that stored all my program files. Then I had two other hard-drives that I just used for storage. It's these two other hard-drives that I simply wanted to plug into the new system. I had hoped that it would just read them like it would for any other drive formated with NTFS file system. Instead, instant blue screen.

I've done this before when I moved from windows Professional 2000 to Windows 7. I just put the old data drives in the new computer and they just showed up. If I put these drives into a machine that runs something other than a Microsoft operating system, I can access the files fine. I could probably pull out another old drive that works and put windows 7 on it, then transfer the files over by simple copy. However, that's a long and tedious process that will tie up my machine for hours. I was hoping to find out exactly why these hard-drives crash windows 10 but work fine everywhere else. I had hoped that there was some driver or adjustment I could make so windows wouldn't crash and it would just read the drives.

hsehestedt said:

That's the problem with a flat out clone - you could potentially have major issues if the hardware is different between the original and new system.

I'm not entirely sure how a standard hard-drive would care what kind of system I had. It's an SATA mechanical drive that has worked fine for years in another system. The hard-drive that I cloned to, works fine and I'm using it now. To take this another step further. I have access to both my brand new drive and the older drive just fine on the same exact system, but running in linux booted from a USB stick. This is happening with both my mechanical storage drives from the old system so it's not just isolated to a single drive either. Both mechanical drives were purchased within that past couple of years so the technology they use should be fairly current and I always kept them de-fragmented and checked the disks semi-regularly. S.M.A.R.T. in BIOS doesn't indicate any issues with the drives.

The clone of the older drive worked fine and I could actually read the data on the new drive in Linux. However, as soon as I booted into windows 10 with the now brand new drive that has the cloned information on it, Windows immediately goes to a blue screen. I deleted the partition on the new drive, re-formatted it and It's currently running fine in the new system. What this told me is that the problem windows is having is with it's initial read of the data on the drive and that windows wasn't crashing because of a hardware issue. Keep in mind that I've tried these drives on other windows 10 systems with the same result. So that would eliminate system hard-ware as being the only possible issue.