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I have a very specific error with an HP Elitebook 8540w notebook into which I have recently upgraded the hard drive, from a Crucial 500GB drive to a Samsung 1TB SSD.

Via booting to a Ubuntu 14 live CD and the GParted partition manager I was able to clone all partitions from the old drive to the new, including a Linux/Windows dual boot.

The clone was unable to duplicate all the aspects of the boot process, with GRUB first and Windows boot manager second. Firstly I was able to use the live CD again and boot-repair the GRUB configuration. Secondly the Windows CD to repair the Windows boot loader. I am able to boot into either Linux or Windows, everything is exactly as it was and applications work.

Now when I an in Windows and initiate a 'restart', the computer will fail to find the hard drive as it reboots, issuing a 'non-system disk or disk error'. A hard reset of the machine corrects the issue and the disk is found fine, showing the GRUB menu.

Restarting from Linux (Ubuntu 16 LTS) does not cause the error, only Windows, and only a soft restart. I have run the BIOS disk checker and memory checker with no errors, re-seated the drive, nothing changes the behaviour.

The reason for the drive upgrade was that occasionally in Windows the system disk would be lost to access and the system would blue-screen shortly after, with no logged errors since it couldn't save them to disk. I presumed the 4 year old SSD that had a hard life was giving up, now I'm not so sure.

Any ideas?

BIOS version: F60 Rev. A 11/11/2015

Update 06/04/2020:

I have since updated to Windows 10 and the issue has not changed. The system is now significantly less stable and this issue may or may not be contributing to that instability.

Update 06/04/2020 #2:

Stability issues seem to have been resolved, and were centred around, RAM that was failing. This fix has not influenced the main issue this question is formed around.

See below that Fast start is not available, hibernate has been disabled in these machines (32GB RAM, SSD, a lot of wear)

Windows power management dialog

Update 08/04/2020: Sleep function fails

A symptom that could be related is a failure to sleep. Upon trying to sleep the machine the machine did what it sometimes does when it crashes hard. There are no messages of interest in the Event Viewer, and as it is restarting, the speakers release a couple of seconds chaotic popping and rattling sounds. I've assumed the sound device just gets in a funny state and starts amplifying a load of random data/switching of devices while the restart happens.

Update 09/04/2020:

Result of powercfg -energy is posted on pastebin here, expiring in 14 days.

Partition layout on drive. I believe these were created using GParted within Linux, and data cloned onto the drives from the host drive having an identical partition layout. The original SSD was 500 GB so all partitions were generally smaller. The original layout started as a pure Windows installation with a post-installation of Ubuntu Linux which modified the partition layout and added a GRUB boot menu:

Partition Layout

System Reserved:

  • F:
  • List item
  • Primary partition
  • 350 MB
  • Windows boot/recovery (?)
  • NTFS

Windows7

  • C:
  • Primary partition
  • 150 GB
  • Windows OS drive
  • NTFS

Unnamed partition

  • /swp
  • Primary partition
  • 32 GB
  • Linux swap drive
  • SWAP

Unnamed partition

  • /
  • Primary partition
  • 150 GB
  • Linux OS drive
  • EXT4

Unnamed partition

  • Extended partition
  • Unnamed drive
    • I:
    • Logical drive
    • 599.17 GB
    • Windows/Linux shared storage
    • NTFS
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    Do you have a fast boot enabled or anything like that in your Control Panel? This causes Windows to perform a hybrid shutdown similar to hibernate, so the filesystem would be in an inconsistent condition, which possibly could be causing it (sometimes they’re correlated, sometimes they’re not, depends on the machine)
    – user962725
    Jun 4, 2019 at 22:23
  • @VarunNarravula Where would I find settings such as that?
    – J Collins
    Jun 4, 2019 at 22:59
  • You can find that in your Control Panel. Go to Control Panel and search up Power settings, then click on “change what the power buttons do” and then hibernate and fast boot should come up. Disable both if available; you need admin privileges. There is also a setting in the BIOS for fast boot usually. Disable that also if applicable.
    – user962725
    Jun 4, 2019 at 23:45
  • @VarunNarravula Such feature doesn't exist in Windows 7. It started with Windows 8. And it's called "Fast Startup". "Fast boot" is a UEFI feature, not Windows.
    – user931000
    Jun 5, 2019 at 7:36
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    Do you have crashes (.dmp) in C:\Windows\Minidump? If yes, please post some. If not, ensure that Windows is configured correctly to Create Dump Files on BSOD.
    – harrymc
    Apr 9, 2020 at 10:48

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