I have an older desktop which was running Windows 7 Pro. My wife insists on keeping Windows. I find it slug slow. I have an old but unused 120GB SSD and I decided to try and copy the whole Windows setup to that SSD. Unfortunately I have broken Windows in the process. Help!
The desktop has an Asus motherboard with a vintage 2013 UEFI BIOS. However CSM is set in the BIOS so that is acting as Legacy, i.e. pure BIOS mode. THe 500GB Seagate HDD has an MBR only, it's not GPT.
I DDed the MBR, the NTFS System Partition and the 490+GB NTFS C: drive to separate image files on an external USB HDD. They all seem OK.
Next, I Defragged C:, using AOMEI Partition Assistant. Wasn't impressed with the results.
I booted into Fossapup 9.5, which I have on a USB, and shrank the C: Partition from 490+ down to 62.5GB, using GParted.
I rebooted into Windows and the C: partition contents seemed OK. I opened files in MS Word, Excel, Windows Media Player and Foxit Reader and it all worked.
I subsequently repeatedly booted into Fossapup and Windows just very briefly each time. I was trying to see if I could get the BIOS to default to booting Windows. The Asus firmware seems very flakey and I have never been able to get the boot order the way I want it, see the earlier thread.
https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 001#p63001
All of a sudden, as I was rebooting, I selected Windows, by opening the BIOS, and Windows failed to boot. It offered the option to let it try to repair itself, which I took. That failed. I do not have a recovery disk.
I assumed that the MBR was most likely corrupt. However, I could look into both NTFS partitions from Fossapup and their internal directories seemed intact. However, there was an oddity. I checked the System partition 15 to 30 minutes after the boot failure was evident. At that time, the boot directory in the that partition and three of the files in it had "Last modified" time stamps 20hours in the future! The files were BCD , BCDbackup.001 and BCD.LOG. THe C: drive partition has, similarly, all three files in the /System Volume Information/SPP directory with future-time values in their time-stamps!
I have never attempted to touch the System partition. I can only assume that poking around so much in the flakey BIOS software was too much for everything. Any ideas about this?
I do have all the data backed up. It wouldn't take much to copy back the MBR and the 100MB system reserved partition. It would take far longer to copy back 490+GB of the C: partition though. What do you think would happen if I left it alone, or possibly just copied back the SPP directory?