I've been handed two Asus laptops to poke around in. They're twins, and the Win8 installations had been abused so they needed a clean up. One went swimmingling, just fired it up removed all the crud, gave it a sweep with ccleaner, AVG and bits and pieces, good to go...

The evil twin however is obdurately obstinate. It complains incessantly it can't talk to the installation service... scratch head, never seen that before... enable and fire up the admin account... same... and the installer service is in fact running, its also throwing some weirdo error at win startup arco or some such... After messing around with that for a while. I decided bugger it, I'll just reset the whole thing and be done with it. This is where it gets interesting... If you go the factory reset option is reports there's a missing partition and its unable to continue. If you go the other way and ask for a system repair, it still reports a partition problem, but not one thats missing. If you compare the partition table on both devices they look the same. At the moment I think, there's either some kind of partition corruption,


































































































































































































or somehow the system partition is locked.

Two things come to mind at the moment, do a system backup of the functioning one and restore it to the dud, or clone the fully functional SSD and use that. Either of these ought to get around the problem, but neither one actually tells


































































































































































































me whats going on... any takers on an idea?

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: (21:3/101)

Windows is designed so you canç't transfer an install from a
computer to the other. My bet is trying to clone won't work.

Normally I'd agree, you wouldn't want to try across disparate systems, as the drivers will be all over the place. However the two laptops for the transplant
































































































































































































are twins. Model and spec wise....

I'd boot System Rescue CD and use testdisk to check for partition
table corruptiona, and check the consistency of the filesystems.

Well I does have any optical device :/ So that was out. BUT I did get a copy of the rescue partition so I had the tools handy.. which did can I just say F*CK all.... All said the same thing missing partition do not pass go.

Anyway turns out cloning does work, it can be a little tricky to get right though. After pfaffing about with all the winblows tools, I'd had to download softs originally to reset the user account password, I went back to the same looking for partition repair, and behold it offered to clone.

My first thought in clone, was do a block for block copy which went great, but when I tried to retore it, it wouldn't fit back on the SSD <boggle> I'm guessing something about physical disparity between two different sized devices
































































































































































































with block sizes. I had to have it copy only used sectors and then it just went swimmingly.

But really at that point you should be scrapping Windows and
installing something else :-P

While on some level I can agree with this, its not mine, so that choice isn't in my hands. There was talk about trying to put win10 on it, I offered 7 in a
































































































































































































pinch. Depends on what its used for though too. This is a lappy that belongs to a "church" gets used by any number of people... all of whom probably have no
































































































































































































idea how it works and all have winblows at home.

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: (21:3/101)