C drive not accessible ("not migrated due to partial or ambiguous match") 5 months after cloning. Now booting off other internal drive (clone of 1st)

[jaHere]

Hi,

4 days ago (Monday morning), when I woke the laptop up, my C drive (SSD) became inaccessible. Event viewer warning says "was not migrated due to partial or ambiguous match." My laptop began booting off my other internal drive (new SSD), which was a clone of the C drive made 5 months ago.

Booting up after shutdown or waking from sleep usually takes several minutes as the computer is "Checking hardware" which results in "Failed", twice. Then it wakes or boots up from the other internal drive.

In the past few weeks I'd noticed the computer taking much longer than usual to go to sleep. Firefox was using 70% or more of my memory (I had more than 1000 tabs open) so I thought that was the problem that caused slow sleep.

I *might* have installed a Microsoft update on Sunday night (not sure); certainly in the last week or so.

Although I was saving most of my work on the new SSD, I still have some data on the original C drive that I'd like to recover. Is that possible? It would also be nice to keep using that volume, if it's possible.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers
ja

Running Win 10 Pro on an Alienware 17 (2014 model).

 

[FreeBooter]

Why can you not recover your files, is it because of file/folder permission?

 

[jaHere]

It's because the drive keeps getting removed by Intel rapid storage technology. It doesn't mount on bootup, so it's not accessible after bootup.

 

[FreeBooter]

Do you get any error message when you try to boot from this drive?

If you want, you can create a bootable Ubuntu USB stick on Windows and use it to back up your files.

Try Ubuntu before you install it | Ubuntu

 

[zbook]

If the computer is not setup with RAID then as a trial and error steps uninstall Intel Rapid Storage Technology and see if makes any difference.

 

[jaHere]

If the computer is not setup with RAID then as a trial and error steps uninstall Intel Rapid Storage Technology and see if makes any difference.

The BIOS says <RAID>.

Problem is: a few years ago I locked the BIOS with a password... and have forgotten the password. I can just read but not dig down or change options.

It's never worked as a RAID. Until 5 months ago there wasn't a 2nd HDD installed. I have a vague memory that a long time ago I might have switched on the RAID option in BIOS, but really don't know for sure.

PS: Just now a new surprise: it tried to restart start up from PXE.

 

[jaHere]

If the computer is not setup with RAID then as a trial and error steps uninstall Intel Rapid Storage Technology and see if makes any difference.

Is there a bug with Intel RST - that it somehow picked up the cloned drive instead of the C drive, and then is ignoring the original C drive?

Can I revert to an older version of Intel RST? This might temporarily solve the problem, but I'm not confident I can do that safely.

 

[x BlueRobot]

Intel RST drivers have caused plenty of problems in the past but I doubt that is the issue with your system. The SSD is likely dying hence why the operating system is refusing to mount it. Have you tried booting with Ubuntu as FreeBooter suggested?