This is partially just for my own reference, so I don’t have to go down this rabbit hole again. (But I hope it helps you, too!)

The Situation

I wanted to upgrade the LITE-ON 256GB SSD in my trusty ol’ Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop to a snazzy new Samsung 960 EVO 2TB drive. I have a version of Acronis that came with a Crucial (or Kingston?) SSD, which has worked great in the past. The problem?

There was a system reserved partition at the very end of the disk, and Acronis therefore would not proportionally scale the OS partition to fill the disk; It would only scale that system reserved partition.

In a moment of errant stupidity, I said, “Ah-hah! If I make the drive a dynamic disk, that will allow me to rearrange the partitions!” (It most certainly will not.)

So I made the main boot drive a dynamic disk. I didn’t think for a second that would render the drive un-clone-able by most any software. Yet, that’s what it did.

Hence my odyssey began…

I tried EASEUS, AOMEI, Acronis, Clonezilla, creating a RAID1 array, Windows Image Backup and even dd.

The free versions of the paid tools (the former three) would not clone dynamic disks, though some claimed that the paid/pro version would. However I wasn’t going to shell out between $49 and $99 to do something that should be free.

Clonezilla had no problem actually cloning the drive, but a non-proportional clone resulted in the remaining ~1.75TB being unusable. I couldn’t create a partition on it using Windows (either in the GUI or using diskpart), and so I tried booting into gparted and creating a new NTFS partition at the end of the disk. That ostensibly worked fine, but then I got the dreaded INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error.

The same error resulted when doing a proportional clone in Clonezilla.

You can’t create a RAID array using a USB drive.. Or at least I couldn’t. (The new SSD was housed temporarily in a USB enclosure.)

Windows Image Backup worked to do the actual.. ahem.. backup, but when I went to restore I got some obscure error about the volume shadow copy service (?????).

And dd just caused the thing not to boot.

Requisite Disclaimer

If you make one minor mistake while doing the below, you could wipe out all the data on your original drive.

Heck, even if you do everything right, your original drive might decide to poop the bed.

So before doing any of this back up your important files to a flash drive, another SSD, a hard drive, a cloud, or 4,000,000,000,000 punch cards. Show the hex representations of each file to an android so that he/she/it can later recreate them via a keyboard with their hands but a blur.

Literally anything is better than just assuming you’ll pull this off without issue.

The Solution!

I put the new 2TB SSD in the laptop and wiped the partitions using gparted. (You won’t have to do this if you’re starting from scratch, as there won’t be any partitions.)

Then I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 using the default settings.

This accomplished two important things:

• It created a 1.86TB (usable) partition for the OS
• It rendered the SSD bootable to that partition

When you’re installing this fresh copy of Windows, leave the network disconnected because you don’t want to get snagged into doing lengthy updates for no reason.

Furthermore, don’t bother changing any settings or doing anything other than the default procedure. Because the next step will wipe all of that out.

The Next Step

Connect the original SSD via USB (or via whatever).

Fire up Clonezilla.

Set it to expert mode.

Don’t let expert mode intimidate you. Most everything is going to stay at the default.

Select a local partition to local partition clone.

Choose the OS partition on your original drive as the source.

Choose the OS partition on the new drive as the target.

Check and check again and again that you have the right source and target selected. If you get it the wrong way around, you’ll end up with your virgin Windows install overwriting your original OS and related files.

When the option comes up, choose to clone the partition proportionally so that it fills the disk. (I’m assuming that you’re going up in size to a larger drive like I was. But either way it should work even if you’re using a drive of the same size. Smaller will not work.)

Commence the clonein’.

Once complete, disconnect the original SSD that’s connected via USB, and remove the Clonezilla flash drive.

Reboot, and you should now have a functional copy of your old system drive.

The new drive will also be marked as a basic disk and can therefore be cloned by most any software until your heart’s content.

I’m migrating a bunch of corporate websites hosted on Win2k8 and IIS7 to a new server running exactly the same. I’m sticking with the same environment because there are some things I really don’t want to risk breaking — we just needed faster hardware and more spindles.

I figured I’d use MS Web Deploy 3.5 to move all the IIS settings from one server to the other (a task that was gloriously simple in IIS6).

Web Deploy adds the following option to the IIS Manager context menus for the server and individual sites:

Oh goodie, I can deploy!

It looks great! Simple and straightforward. Export or import.

Indeed it’s a simple interface. I wanted to export everything, so I chose to deploy from the server level.

But..

But it’s never really that simple, is it? (Well, except in IIS6.)

Here’s a redacted view of the package contents selector. It’s actually about 50 items at the top level, but annoyingly the box cannot be resized (though it does scroll horizontally by itself which is super annoying):

OK, it looks like all the settings and crap that’s in IIS. What it doesn’t show, and hence what’s not selectable, is that the file system contents is included in the package. I had already robocopied the file system over, thinking that I’d just be exporting and importing the IIS settings. It generated a 25GB zip file.

It was a horrible waste of time, because it forces you to encrypt the contents of the package (even though I was exporting it to the local file system and would be copying it across a private LAN and there’s no sensitive customer data in there). I can copy the uncompressed files much faster than compressing and encrypting something like 40GB of content.

Whatever, I can deal with that. Except there’s no way to cancel the operation! The cancel button is greyed out. The “X” in the upper-right to close the dialog is clickable, and in fact does close it. Except that the operation keeps running in the background, which is not made clear anywhere in the UI. I didn’t realize that and went back to messing around with options, and eventually saw that a 25GB file had popped up in my temp dir!

Now for the import..

I temporarily moved some hardly-ever-accessed directories out of the web hierarchy so that I could run a faster export. A nice compact 2.7GB file was the result. I moved that over to the new server, and did the ol’ Deploy -> Import. It started, and then crashed right away.

The operation failed with the most user-unfriendly, borderline-useless, college-project error message possible: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Click for the full monty.

We’ve all seen that error message before, but on a mature product from a multi-billion dollar company? Phhht. What am I talking about, it’s Microsoft after all.

At least they included the stack trace! That at least gives a clue!

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.CertStoreSettingsProvider.Delete(Boolean whatIf)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentObject.DeleteOperation(DeploymentSyncContext syncContext)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentObject.Delete(DeploymentSyncContext syncContext)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.HandleDelete(DeploymentObject destObject, DeploymentObject sourceParentObject)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.SyncChildrenOrder(DeploymentObject dest, DeploymentObject source)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.SyncChildrenOrder(DeploymentObject dest, DeploymentObject source)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.ProcessSync(DeploymentObject destinationObject, DeploymentObject sourceObject)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentObject.SyncToInternal(DeploymentObject destObject, DeploymentSyncOptions syncOptions, PayloadTable payloadTable, ContentRootTable contentRootTable, Nullable`1 syncPassId, String syncSessionId)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentObject.SyncTo(DeploymentProviderOptions providerOptions, DeploymentBaseOptions baseOptions, DeploymentSyncOptions syncOptions)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentObject.SyncTo(DeploymentWellKnownProvider provider, String path, DeploymentBaseOptions baseOptions, DeploymentSyncOptions syncOptions)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.UI.InstallProgressWizardPage.OnWorkerDoWork(Object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
   at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.WorkerThreadStart(Object argument)

As you can see from the second line, it’s trying to delete something from the Certificate Store (I suppose). A quick Googling found a German guy that was experiencing the same error. That lead to a red herring post about different .NET framework versions (I have the same versions of .NET installed on both machines, so that’s not my issue).

Unfortunately I had closed the error dialog, but I tried running the process again and I noticed this:

There’s the key that’s causing all the faff.

So it’s trying to delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/IIS/CentralCertProvider, which doesn’t exist on either the source or destination server. In fact, the entire IIS key doesn’t exist. The solution seemed obvious to me:

That’s right.

That’s right, I just created the key and added a nonsense string value for no reason. It then ran past the point of the NullReferenceException.

But wait, there’s more!

It crashed again, with an error message and stack trace even more useless than the first:

Click for full size.

I can’t sigh enough at this one. I’m not asking for the world here, but at least say what file and line you were processing when the exception was thrown. This is Computer Programming 101 level stuff here. Not what you’d expect from version 3.5 of a utility meant for enterprise use. Even when I half-ass programs for my own personal use (which I do quite often), I have better error handling.

System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: 'count' must be non-negative.
Parameter name: count
   at System.String.CtorCharCount(Char c, Int32 count)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.XmlElementProvider.GetIndentWhitespace(XmlElement element, XmlWhitespace& before, XmlWhitespace& after)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.XmlElementProvider.AddChild(DeploymentObject source, Int32 position, Boolean whatIf)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentObject.AddChild(DeploymentObject source, Int32 position, DeploymentSyncContext syncContext)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.HandleAddChild(DeploymentObject destParent, DeploymentObject sourceObject, Int32 position)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.SyncChildrenOrder(DeploymentObject dest, DeploymentObject source)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.SyncChildrenNoOrder(DeploymentObject dest, DeploymentObject source)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.SyncChildrenNoOrder(DeploymentObject dest, DeploymentObject source)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.HandleAddChild(DeploymentObject destParent, DeploymentObject sourceObject, Int32 position)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.SyncChildrenOrder(DeploymentObject dest, DeploymentObject source)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.SyncChildrenOrder(DeploymentObject dest, DeploymentObject source)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentSyncContext.ProcessSync(DeploymentObject destinationObject, DeploymentObject sourceObject)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentObject.SyncToInternal(DeploymentObject destObject, DeploymentSyncOptions syncOptions, PayloadTable payloadTable, ContentRootTable contentRootTable, Nullable`1 syncPassId, String syncSessionId)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentObject.SyncTo(DeploymentProviderOptions providerOptions, DeploymentBaseOptions baseOptions, DeploymentSyncOptions syncOptions)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.DeploymentObject.SyncTo(DeploymentWellKnownProvider provider, String path, DeploymentBaseOptions baseOptions, DeploymentSyncOptions syncOptions)
   at Microsoft.Web.Deployment.UI.InstallProgressWizardPage.OnWorkerDoWork(Object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
   at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.WorkerThreadStart(Object argument)

Moreover, is this even a recoverable error? It looks like it’s trying to count the characters using CtorCharCount, which is some kind of private or protected method (?) called in the String constructor (apparently):

CtorCharCount is one of those optimizing implementation details that can get kind of confusing if you try to expose it to users. It’s called as part of the string ctor in some cases. (Source: social.msdn.microsoft.com)

It’s constructing some string while adding a child to an XML node (?) during some kind of sync (?) process, or something. If this were based upon open source code I could figure it out pretty easily. But it’s most definitely not open source.

Work around?

Nope. I figured I’d start by trying to export and then import the sites one by one to see which one causes an error. Well, if you export a site you can’t import it unless that site exists on the target. It treats the site as a Web Application, even if you’re exporting the entire site.

I tried de-selecting all the locations except for one very simple website in the server export, but it still failed.

And now…

I don’t care anymore.

I’ve already wasted too much time on this. More time in fact than it will take me to manually recreate the handful of websites and web apps on the new server. So I’m done. I hope that if you were encountering the NullReferenceException this helped you.

Otherwise it was cathartic for me.

I wouldn’t be so hard on the developers of this tool if I were doing anything weird or unexpected. But I’m trying to migrate the settings from one instance of IIS to another, which is what the tool is alleged to do. The sites and web apps I have to migrate are few, and they’re not very complicated. This should have worked right off the bat.

If anyone has a solution, please let me know. Maybe I’m just being blinded by irritation and I’m missing something simple. But like I said, it’s time to go and do this the old-fashioned way.