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Cloned HDD to m.2 SSD, booted with both hard drives connected, now can't startup just using ssd

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I cloned the HDD to the SSD through Windows 10. Then I restarted the computer with both drives connected and it didn't boot. I shut off my computer and disconnected the HDD and tried to boot again but it still fails, showing error 0xc000000e. In the BIOS is does show the SSD as the boot drive and it is able to correctly read the capacity of it so it seems like it can read the SSD.

I'm not really sure how to proceed from here. Remove the SSD (which is kind of a pain since there isn't much room to work with in my pre-built PC) and try booting from the HDD?

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Repeat the cloning process and after it completes shut down you machine and reboot with only the SSD connected. The problem you had was caused by the fact that both drives were connected and windows became confused. See [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this!!! | Acronis Forum

Hank, welcome to these public User Forums.

Couple of observations:

In the BIOS is does show the SSD as the boot drive

If your BIOS shows the actual SSD as the boot drive and not 'Windows Boot Manager' then your system is being booted in Legacy / MBR mode.

Cloned HDD to m.2 SSD

M.2 SSD's are normally NVMe drives and require UEFI / GPT to boot correctly, hence the previous comment.  This assumes that you have a UEFI capable BIOS for your computer.

You may also need any additional device drivers needed for your new M.2 drive.

Try selecting your original HDD in the BIOS as the boot device and test that you are still able to boot into Windows from that drive.

Next, per the topic referenced by Thomas, make a full disk backup of your HDD to an external backup drive before attempting anything else.

Thanks for the ideas. So I connected the HDD and set it to boot before the SSD and it didn't work. I removed the SSD and it booted fine from the HDD. 

I'm 90% sure the BIOS had the SSD under the Windows Boot Manager. I'm also 90% sure I initialized the SSD as GPT. 

I created a Windows Media Thingy on USB and when I was trying to use it for recovery it showed all my files on my SSD. It just couldn't boot and couldn't repair it for some reason.

I am hoping to copy my programs over instead of reinstalling Windows so I don't lose my installed programs. 

So now, how do I repeat the cloning process? If I reinstall the SSD won't I run into the issue where it can't boot again since both are connected?

 

Edit: Brief update. Also, since my SSD is no longer connected I can't start Arconis because it requires having a Western Digital device installed.

Hank, how does your Windows 10 boot from the HDD, is this Legacy or UEFI - this is very important as this is also how the cloned SSD will boot regardless of formatting it as GPT?

Run the command msinfo32 in Windows and look at the BIOS mode value shown in the right panel - this will show either Legacy or UEFI.

See the forum topics below where other users have being doing similar migrations:

Topic: How to transfer a Windows 10 installation to a SSD NVME drive using Acronis

Topic: Clone from SATA HDD to NVMe SSD?

Topic: How to clone/migrate O/S system disk sata ssd over too a new NVME M2 SSD without data loss

Topic: Problem Cloning to an m.2 (Samsung 960 EVO 1TB) (PCIE NVME)

Topic: problem with upgrading NVMe M.2 SSD

Unfortunately, OEM versions of ATI such as that from WD do have restrictions / limitations such as requiring a WD drive to be present.  This is not the case for the full ATI application.

Now that you are back to the HDD booting intoi Windows without problem, try shutting the computer down fully (press the Shift key when clicking on Shutdown), then reinstall the new SSD and try booting into Windows.  This hopefully should boot into the OS ok, and if so, then use the option in ATI to create the bootable rescue media at that time, plus make a full disk backup of the HDD to an external backup drive.