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Cloned Disk Does not boot

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Hi, Could use a little direction on this one. Goal is to copy HDD->SSD, replace the drive for speed up on laptop. Attached 480GB Sandisk SSD via external USB enclosure. Booted Dell Inspiron 5551 w/Acronis True Image Linux-based Repair tool USB UEFI. Executed clone operation successfully. Exchange SSD in place of HDD in laptop. Did not boot, Win10 came up stating drive needs repair. Win10 repair disk not handy (of course) I was able to get to boot by going into boot manager upon reset and selecting the second partition found in the UEFI boot list. By default, the BIOS must always be going to the first one which for some reason is not bootable. I am fairly sure this has something to do with Win Boot Manager but this has always confused me. Anyway, a) I thought a clone would be an exact copy and I would simply drop it in. Apparently almost but not quite. b) What is the suggested course of action. Thanks in advance.

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John, welcome to these public User Forums.

When cloning to a laptop drive, it is recommended that the target drive is installed inside the laptop rather than connected externally.

If your laptop boots into Windows using UEFI, then the BIOS boot device should always be 'Windows Boot Manager' not any particular drive by make/model.

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

Thanks SS for the info.  I put the target drive in the laptop and the source drive in the USB enclosure.  Still the same result.  Windows Boot Manager showed 2 drives and would not boot.  It comes back to my original question which is "when is a clone not really a clone?"  However, I did arrive at a solution.  I had created a Windows 10 Repair USB stick which I used on the "cloned" SSD.  It did state "attempting repair" and after 5 minutes or so seemed to do something (not clear).  Ultimately, after a "update" and reboot, things started working as expected. So that is great and I now have my SSD bootable laptop.  But it still begs the question, what in the process is not working to create a clone?  I strongly suspect it has something to do with hidden bootable or recovery partitions on the original OEM Dell HDD but not clear.  

I haven't trusted True Image to perform a clone in quite a while. I do connect ALL drives internally and have always received mixed results. I now use MiniTool's Disk Copy and it works a much higher proportion of the time (just watch out for PuAs when installing).