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Can't boot with the new SSD after cloning the system with Acronis Sabrent

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Twice I have tried cloning my system that sits on a 256GB SSD to my 500GB Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0. After the cloning is done, I shut the laptop, take out the old SSD stick, and turn the laptop on; however, both times, Windows wasn't able to boot. It goes into diagnostics and fails to repair. Any help would be much appreciated.

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Sinan, welcome to these public User Forums.

See KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to all OEM versions of ATI supplied with hardware purchases.

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.

This is a situation where you need to create the Acronis Rescue Media and test booting your laptop from this to confirm that you can see the NVMe SSD drive.  If you are using the Linux based rescue media, then this may not find NVMe drives and doesn't have support for any using RAID (for performance), so you would need to create WinPE media instead.

NVMe drives also normally require UEFI / GPT boot for the OS to support them, so the rescue media needs to use the same UEFI boot mode too.

See KB 63226: Acronis True Image 2020: how to create bootable media and KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

I would imagine the issue is that moving from SSD to a PCIe NVME is not a true clone because the hardware/technology is different (not like a spinning drive and an SSD that are both SATA).

If the clone is successful, you may need to still go into the bios and specifically select the new drive as the first boot priority or it could be trying to boot something else like a CD rom, or external USB that is not bootable.

Ultimately though, I would try without cloning.  Instead, make a full disk backup of the original drive.  Then restore that backup to the new NVME drive.  Disconnect the original, boot DIRECTLY INTO THE BIOS first and then make sure the new drive has first boot priority.

Also, we don't know how the original OS is/was installed?  If it was a legacy (MBR) install and you cloned the drive, a PCIe NVME drive will never boot as it must be UEFI.  If it is a Windows 7 OS, it will not boot by default since Windows 7 doesn't have native drivers to boot on a PCIe NVME drive (it can be done, but not natively).  These are Windows limitations, but there is no background on the original system OS name and version, the original system OS install type (MBR/Legacy or UEF/GPT) and/or if the bios was configured with the correct boot settings. 

@Steve Smith Unfortunately I can't connect the old drive via USB cause even though it's SATA it's a PCIe stick as well and I don't have an enclosure box. That being said, that shouldn't be the problem as I completely take out the old disk before booting with the new one for the first time.

 

@Bobbo_3C0X1 I'm using Win10 Hone Edition. I always make sure that the boot order is in place.

However, I think you are onto something, regarding SATA to NVMe clone. I just checked the newly cloned disk through Disk Management, by putting it into another machine. The disk's largest partition is shown as (Primary Partition) but not (Boot, Page File, Crush Dump, Primary Partition). So I believe indeed it's not bootable. 

I have just back up my system drive, and started recovering to the new drive with that image. I report the results once it's done but please let me know if you think of anything else.