I’m having some hard drive trouble here and I’m in a bit of a pickle. I recently had to buy a new laptop, however, I had an SSD from my old laptop that I decided I would put into my GFs laptop which was running slowly. I used the same process that I used to install the SSD onto my previous laptop – I formatted the drive and then clone her HDD onto the SDD. I understand cloning may not be the best option and a fresh install would be preferred. However, she has amassed many premium programs that she requires for her disability that she was given for free at University and cannot install them again onto another PC. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the SDD to boot although this isn’t really the problem.
The problem is, in the meantime while I was trying to figure out why the clone didn’t work, I put the HDD back in to the laptop expecting things to work like normal. However, this isn’t the case. Ever since I cloned it using Macrium Reflect (free version), the HDD is painfully slow to boot. This morning I got back from the gym and she was super ****ed and upset, all her work from last night hadn’t saved (now, I’ not sure if this is her fault or mine), but the laptop is taking around 15 minutes just to boot up – it’s normally on in around 3-5 minutes from cold. However, when the laptop is booted up it works as normal. The circle that spins when Windows 8 is loading goes around very slowly. The dots are almost going around 1 at a time they are going so slow rather than in unison like normal.
She is at work now but I’m very worried that I have compromised her laptop and I am struggling for any ideas.
My question is: does anyone have any ideas why the HDD is performing so slowly after I went through the cloning process. I thought all I was doing was taking a system image not altering the HDD in any way, so I am confused as to why this has happened.
The last back-up I performed of her laptop was around a week ago – I could get all the files that have been modified in that time onto an external HDD, but would a system restore to that point (before the clone) perhaps restore it back to normal function? I understand this is very limited information, but I’m really at a loss and I feel really guilty. I was just trying to make her work more efficient as she spends a long time waiting for things to load, but I have made things worse for her. I am just trying to collect ideas for what I can do tonight to try and rectify this.
To the best of my knowledge her laptop is: Acer TravelMate (one of the P series) and I believe this comes with a Toshiba 500gb HDD. She is running Windows 8.1, 64-bit. There is no defragmentation of the disk and chkdsk reports no errors.
Any help would be amazing, thanks!
You suggest using "System Restore"
This is an option and is well worth a try.
If there were any registry changes during the cloning this will put the system back to the way it was prior to using Macrium.
Any installations / updates after the selected date will be lost.