Dell Backup and Recovery issue with SSD

Hi Tosolo,

What did you use to clone? Cloning is hit and miss, especially with Windows 8. We usually recommend you perform a clean installation of the OS.

Hello and thank you for your reply,

I used the Samsung Data Migration. So, do you think it is better to reinstall Windows 8?

I also thought so but... the DBR issue, will it disappear? I don't want to have 46 GB only for DBR as soon as I install it. I have a 250GB SSD, you know...

I uninstalled DBR and removed the huge recovery partition. Can I install windows 8 without DBR? I have already saved elsewhere all my data.

I guess that is a DBR issue which came out with the cloning process; I just don't want to find the problem again after the clean installation.

Thank you again

Tosolo,

I had almost the same thing happen to me when I upgraded my XPS13 from 256GB SSD to 1TB SSD earlier this week.

I found several other posts than mention that current DELL recovery partitions are tattooed (marked) to the orignal hard drive and the information encrypted. (so they won't work after transfer)

I did my migration using SW from Paragon.

The recovery partition did appear to copy to the new drive, however I get the same message as you when I start up my DBR. However, last night I did confirm that I can still use DBR to maintain my backups on an external drive.  So that part of DBR still works, so I'm not sure why that portion of the tool doesn't work for you.

In my case,  I think I have 2 options now

Option (1) When I open DBR and in addition to saying the partition is damaged, it offers to repair it using the original backups that were made when the computer was new (backups which I have), however it warns that data may be lost.  I assume this means you are resetting everything back to factory fresh (with no user installed programs).  This is not an attractive option to me, so I will not do it.

Option (2) Continue to use DBR for only the functions of scheduled or impromptu backups to external hard drive and delete the useless recovery partition (in my case 500mb) - TBD I need to find out if deleting this useless recovery partition will cause any problems.

Note: When I purchased my computer, I did several backups as follows:

1) Rescue/Repair disk on USB flash drive

2) Factory Image to external USB HDD

3) Complete image backup to that same USB HDD (this is the backup that I maintain)

With all of those (3), the recovery partition on the computer itself is not required.

Assuming you have already done that, you are OK and perhaps you can delete the recovery partition (first confirm you can do this without problem), then adopt a different way to backup your computer (i.e. don't use DBR, use another solution like Acronis or Paragon)

You are best to use Dell Backup and Recovery on the original installation to make a Rescue Disk (Bootable External Hard Drive) or Factory Backup (Bootable USB). You can then use this media to install the factory settings on a new SSD. I demonstrate this procedure on my Inspiron 13 7347 here:

http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/dell-backup-and-recovery/

Thank you for your help. I will try your suggestions and then I will let you know

natakuc4 is my forum username but I am Philip Yip...

If you performed a clean Windows installation and then installed Dell Backup and Recovery it will make factory settings on the new drive (regardless if its a HDD or SSD). You can use Dell Backup and Recovery to create a Rescue Disk and use this to restore the installation on a new SSD/HDD.

I am wondering however why you decided to clean install on your hard drive and not on your solid state drive directly...

Hi Philip,

actually I am already using my SSD. And it has got a corrupted recovery partition, probably due to a bad cloning process from the old HDD. Now, if I try to install DBR on this SSD I am not able to do any backup. So I am going to clean install Windows on this SSD. I was wondering if the "clean" installation will be actually clean if I start from this SSD with the bad partition.

I try to summarize (sorry but I am not english and I struggle to explain my situation).

I have a SSD mounted on my laptop with a bad recovery partition, hence DBR is now not installed since useless.

My data are saved elsewhere. I haven't got any other backup with the factory settings.

I followed your steps to do a clean installation and now I have a bootable USB with Windows8.1. I want to restart my PC, and install Windows 8.1 from this USB.

After that I will install all the drivers and the OS updates.

Finally, I will install Dell Backup and Recovery and do the factory settings backup onto another USB.

Hopefully the corrupted partition will be gone.
RIght?

Thanks

In that case use DISKPART > CLEAN on the SSD:

http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/a-clean-install-of-windows/a-clean-install-of-windows-8-1/useofdiskpart/

After that's done perform the clean installation.

Philip,

(my system XPS13 Haswell, Win8.1 Pro)

I read through your site at the link you provided.  Excellent site btw.

My laptop is migrated already from 256gb to new 1TB, preserving all my original programs and settings.  I don't want to go the path of a resinstall to factory settings, however, I do have all my Dell and windows recovery and rescue media.

Current situation

1) Recovery partition appears present, but I suspect the content did not copy over (saw other posts that said this partition is encrytped and will not migrate over to new drive)

2) DBR gives warning messages related to damaged recovery partition

3) At least one time so far this week, I've seen very high CPU usage associated with "toaster.exe"

Questions:

A) Is it possible to restore Dell working recovery partitions now, without losing or risking to distrub all my data and programs now?  I use this laptop for work and home, and there are a lot of custom tweaks to make it work in our corporate environment while travelling.

or

B) Is it possible to delete the unusable Dell recovery partition and make DBR premium ok with the fact that the partition is not there? >> I'm perfectly fine without the recovery partitions....I just want DBR to be OK with that...

(I was thinking to permanently stop DBR from starting up and only using it when I want to do backups)

Info: I used DBR to make an image backup before and after HDD migration.  I didn't check yet, but I should have both of those images on my external 2TB HDD.

thanks

Ross