OT: Disk Cloning/Upgrades Tip

[Fairlight]

I just thought I'd share a recent experience, and the lesson learned.
Maybe it'll save someone else a migraine or five.
  
Short story, I had a pair of hard drives which were exhibiting multiple
signs of starting to die a slow death.  I got a pair of twin 1TB WD Black
drives to replace my 2008 WD Caviar (the 2008 equivalent, although
significantly slower!).  I figured I'd replace them before I had to
reinstall allllll that software I have from scratch (some of which I don't
even have the media or installers for anymore).

Got CloneZilla, got GParted.  Cloned, ran into errors on the second drive
(the non-system drive, thankfully).  It was actually even resetting the
SATA controller every time I tried it.  Finally, I just let it go, figuring
it was part of the drive dying, I'd take what I can get and pray, since it
wasn't the system drive.  I resized the NTFS filesystems with GParted.  I
cannot say enough good things about GParted, incidentally...absolutely
phenomenal software!!!

Got the system booting on the new drives...sort of.  It would boot, but it
would not stay up in anything other than safe mode.  Any time I let the
pre-login sequence FULLY complete, logging in yielded either a blue screen
or it just hung.  Any time I tried logging in sooner, it'd get so far and
I'd get a BSOD.  I thought a certain program was responsible, as I was
getting BAD_POOL_CALLER on the BSOD.  But it was never the same thing
twice.  I tried fixing it a few different ways, all to no avail.  The best
thing I got was a more generic (if that's even possible) 0x0000008e BSOD,
which generally points to bad RAM.

Grabbed memtest86.  Lo and behold I'm failing like 3 out of 5 passes with
errors in the same place.  Well dammit.  Replaced the RAM (with faster RAM
that -should- have been put in by my integrator to begin with, years ago).
Let that run for 24hrs.  In 25 passes, I got zero errors.  I'd call that
clean RAM.

After fixing the MBR on the old boot drive (NO idea how that got screwed,
other than possibly the bad RAM or the drive partly dying
selectively...more likely the former), I started over.

Clone.  Clone.  Resize.  Resize.  Boot.  Beautiful!  Found new hardware
(the new drive models).  Reboot.  Beautiful!  It's like the system was
never down at all.  Better, it's stable, and it's 30-50% faster, between
the faster RAM and the much faster drives.

But the second time went off without a hitch.  This is the way it was
-supposed- to go the first time.  Oh, did I mention that the SATA
controller never once reset, nor did I have any errors during cloning this
time around?

Moral of the story:  If you're going to replace your drives and do a clone
for a bare metal replacement, TEST YOUR RAM FIRST.  Even if you -think-
your RAM is good, TEST YOUR RAM BEFORE YOU EVEN START.

I kid you not.  That one issue, unbeknownst to me until memtest86 told me
about it, had me hunting down what was wrong with my cloned drives on and
off in my free time for three days.  The actual process -really- only takes
a few hours (figure five, all said and done, including reboots that take a
bit because I have [count 'em!] ***30*** things in systray, and even more
services behind the scenes), for moving twin vintage 2008 500GB drives to
twin modern 1TB performance drives).

Seriously.  The very, VERY first step in any drive migration involving
cloning should be a memtest86 run.  Run it for about 4hrs or so if you see
no errors.  It turned out mine saw errors within one hour.  :/  And yet, it
was a very specific memory address that wasn't getting hit reliably enough
by anything to give up the hint without a test.  You may take 4hrs or so to
do this, but it can save you hours to days of hunting in vain for the
actual culprit (which I -thought- was some driver somewhere throwing a
hissy fit!).

Doesn't matter what OS or cloning software you're using, or how reliable
the system seems to be.  If you're cloning drives, check your RAM's
integrity before even starting.  Seriously.

MemTest86
CloneZilla
GParted

In that order.

May this save someone the hell that I endured.

As a side note, now that I actually have the space again, I'm defragmenting
my drives.  I'm noticing that UltraDefrag (free open-source program for
Windows) is a lot faster, a lot more accurate, and a -lot- gentler on the
drives than Windows' own defragmentation tool.  They're not thrashing
nearly as much.  Just a heads-up for the Windows users.

Happy (and hopefully trouble-free) upgrading!

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.