SOLVED ! Flickering screen on cloned drive in win10

Author: Bob Tall
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3m 19s Lenght
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For many months I've been struggling with NOT knowing if my cloned drives were properly cloned. Finally, I found a process that gave me the confidence that my cloned hard drives were, in fact, exact clones. I use cloning for my backups. If a hard drive fails, i don't want to bother with recreating a hard drive from various incremental backups. I want to be able to swap hard drives with one of my cloned drives and not miss a beat. I have usb external hard drives that are clones. But, I also have a BLACX box made by Thermaltake. It connects via usb3.0, and allows me to clone directly to a sata drive, which can then be inserted directly into desktop after a failure. I have separate cloned drives from yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, and six months ago. In windows 10, microsoft introduced a "fast start" feature. This creates a "hibernation" file (hiberfil.sys) that remembers many of your hard drive settings, so that, at startup, these settings/drivers are loaded from this file. So, when you clone your drive WITH the hibernation file (ie. fast start mode), and switch the boot drive to your newly cloned drive, the newly cloned drive contains the hibernation file from the original drive. You would think that it shouldn't matter, especially in my case where both drives are the same manufacturer/model/size. But no, when your cloned drive tries to boot, for some reason, this file (cloned from your original drive) confuses the system (Don't ask me why). TWO STEPS: 1. So, BEFORE cloning (and if you don't mind a little longer startup) go to "Power options" in the control panel. Click on "Choose what the power buttons do." Then click on "Change settings that are currently unavailable". At the bottom you will see a checkmark for "turn on fast startup". Uncheck it, then clone your drive. 2. If you want to test if your cloned drive boots properly (without flickering), I disconnected all sata drives and reconnected the sata cable from my working hard drive ..... to the newly cloned hard drive. And Voila ! For the first time in MANY months, no flickering. Now, both hard drives are connected, and I can go into my BIOS and pick either drive as the boot drive, and they both boot and look normal. TIPS: If it still isn't working for you... erase the hiberfil.sys, pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys from the DESTINATION DISK FIRST (not the source disk your system is currently using). Administrator rules will make it cumbersome, but select properties, security, advanced, continue, enable inheritance, apply, then delete each. Also, don't clone from the seagate recovery/boot disk - it bypasses some steps - and when running diskwizard from your desktop, select manual not automatic, and select "as-is" for sector by sector copying. And lastly, if the free Seagate version of Acronis doesn't work for you. Uninstall it, and download/install the Western Digital version of Acronis. I've had experience with the Seagate version not working, and the Western Digital working (you'll need a WD drive. I use an external). Another option is Macrium's free cloning software. I have had success with it. With one caveat, I click on the advanced options to select "perform a forensic sector copy" which is more thorough, but takes longer.

Comments

1. I had one when i was logging in but i did log in