New
#301
Solved ** random freezes after restoring system backup onto new SSD
I want to add my experience to reinforce the revelation of Micboule. I read more than 20 pages of this thread while trying to solve my problem and came back to this post after trying many recommendations that seemed like more plausible solutions. The advice to UNINSTALL Acronis True Image 2014 was THE CHANGE that returned my system from freezing within 5 minutes from reboot to functioning continuously for more than 48 hours now including several sleep/reawaken cycles. Thanks to Micboule and previous posters who ran this to ground and took time to post their findings.
Backstory:
In what I expected to be a simple operation running in the background, I planned to upgrade my mechanical 1TB drive to a Crucial MX200 1TB SSD. My HDX18 "laptop" has 2 internal bays so I planned to remove my media drive and temporarily install the SSD in the 2nd bay for a cloning operation that could happen while I continued to work. TI 2014 failed gave me an error code 10 'File system error is found' with extended code: 458,777 'File record corrupted'. I received this error with both attempting to use the interactive clone process running Windows 10 and also using the process booting from a prepared TI 2014 USB where my source drive would not be in use for the OS. With no findings from ChkDsk and no help from Acronis forums, I took the long path of making a full system backup onto external disks and then restoring onto the internally mounted SSD in bay 2.
I chose every validation and verification option available for the creation and restoration. This plan seemed to work well with the following exceptions:
- The backup of 640GB, with chosen setting of max compression, ended up spanning more than 800GB and requiring me to add a 2nd external disk. Acronis, I believe during verification needed help finding a 2nd volume it placed on the 1st external disk but accepted my selection and continued when it stopped and waited for me to browse to the location. (After all operations completed, inspection of external disk shows that only half the space was used even though during operations it was shown to be full.)
- I believe for verification of restore, operations stopped with progress bar showing 19 hours more. Message explained that restart was required and if I would choose Cancel instead that restore would be undone. I was expecting this issue from reading Acronis instructions to make sure at no time there would be 2 bootable drives installed (I presumed during boot). This led to anxiety of how the remaining 19 hours of operations would continue after restart because I would have to remove my source drive and this was the location of the Acronis software being run to perform operations. Not knowing what else to do, I selected restart and planned to watch for the correct moment to force a power off and remove the source drive.
- I tired of watching after a few hours of seeing a blue screen with message 'Operations are in progress. Windows will shut down after operations have completed." At least this message gave me some confidence that I would not have to spring into action upon observing the power cycle. After waiting more than 24 hours with very little disk light activity, I forced a power off and removed the source drive and then learned by BIOS messages that I needed to place the SSD in bay 1. Without confirmation that any of the remaining 19 hours of restore activity transpired, my system booted on the SSD and quick investigations revealed my files seemed intact.
- After about 10 minutes, I encountered my first freeze where an application would not close and the start menu was unresponsive. I spent hours experiencing these every 1 - 10 minutes while trying to characterize the problem and investigate solutions. Eventually, I turned to investigating on another machine and found this thread.
I attempted many solutions from sfc to DISM to a minor registry edit with no success. I updated SSD firmware to mu03 and still had freezes. Eventually, I called Crucial tech support and was pleasantly surprised to connect to a very confident and clearly spoken tech. He explained that my system is likely suffering from too many copies spanning too many years as I navigated from Vista through Windows 7 and from a 500GB drive through a mechanical 1TB drive. My system image was copied using the originally specified 512B blocks eventually onto an SSD that likes 4KB and it is likely that some corruption occurred along the way that results in random freezes and other troubles. Just before switching back to my source drive and continuing use of it until I could find time to build and populate the SSD from scratch, I deleted TI 2014 and was rewarded with the solution to the freezing problems. I am now studying how to create my various desired backup solutions using Windows tools. I don't plan to upgrade to TI 2016.