Goat Cheese, very good!
I have two computers recently upgraded to Win 10. One clean install and one legacy upgrade.
The legacy upgraded computer’s primary hard drive was failing (I’ll call this the “woodchipper” because that’s the sound it was making when booting.
I downloaded Marcrium Reflect and cloned it to a second drive.
The computer booted up on the good harddrive after I changed boot disk order.
Needlessly complicating factors:
After the upgrade to win 10, I created a new, 2nd accounts
After the cloning with Macrium Reflect, the pre Win 10 drive would sometimes function as the boot drive if I had accessed the old pre Win user account (I could hear the woodchipper start when booting). I checked the user accounts and it seemed that the pre10 user account defined drive C as the woodchipper, and the post Win 10 user account defined the boot drive as the good harddrive.
If I was logged in to the pre win 10 user account and signed off for the night, the next time I logged on, the woodchipper would once again roar to life. So I tried to avoid working on that drive at all and was planning to remove it.
Sadly, before I removed the woodchipper, I made a mistake.
There were two files on the woodchipper that I wanted to access. Would have taken 15 minutes to recreate them but in the words of one of my Internet heroes, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
Working from the post Win 10 user account, I accessed the cloned woodchipper for those two files. Had trouble accessing them and got a message asking me if I would like to “permanently” access that drive. I didn’t realize at the time what that question meant and so I said, “Yes” I think I actually interrupted the process of permanently accessing it because I saw the files 2 files I needed already, and a lot of others I already had cloned.
I copied those 2 files from the woodchipper. I apparently now boot off of the newer drive and access userflies and programs stored on the wood chipper whether I want to or not. Attempting to access the “documents” folder on the new drive doesn’t work, but I can access the documents folder on the wood chipper. Can’t replace the new drive’s documents folder (which displays as empty) with the woodchipper’s documents folder.
If I try using Macrium to copy the documents folder to the woodchipper, it’s likely it will be incomplete and I probably will likely fail to capture complete content from the woodchipper because I interrupted the process of “permanently accessing” it. It appears my installation is divided over 2 drives, one of which is failing, and sometimes still booting off the woodchipper.
I was hoping to keep my legacy programs but chances seem to be dimming. My only hope of doing so looks like I’d need to get a 3rd drive and backup to that, but is that possible when I’m booting off of new drive and the old drive has the userfiles. Not really sure, now that I think about it, where the OS is finding program files to run.
If I haven’t anesthetized you yet - any suggestions to get everything onto good drive? What would happen if I physically removed the wood chipper - could WIn 10 default to the obsolete documents folder or would that make things worse?
Time to take it to the shop? Hoped to avoid the hassle, can work on a laptop that I upgraded at the same time, but that was a clean install and I haven’t installed programs/configured it yet.