dual boot misadventures, "operating system not found" and how I recovered from it 10+ hours later :)

(EDIT AND UPDATE - you may get the dreaded " an operating system wasn't found" error when restoring from an Acronis True Image backup " ... scroll down towards the end of this post for the info I found that deals with this )

To begin with I absolutely should have used Steve Smith's incredibly helpful advice listed in this thread here (scroll down to post 11 on there I think) rather  than blindly rushing into it like I did

(whoops never mind I'm not allowed to post  links apparently ) 

But here's some advice for people like me who are stupid so you don't have to spend 10 hours in a row wrestling with this the way I did :P 

I should start out by saying too... set a System Restore point on both Win 8 and Win 10 (or whatever two flavors of Windows you are running) , this is what saved me later on ... and while you're at it back up that registry for both Win 8 and Win 10 onto a usb thumb drive, that would have saved me a world of grief too 

So I have Windows 8.1 on one SSD drive, Windows 10 on a second SSD drive, and I get the usual blue screen you're supposed to get asking which Windows installation I want to run when I turn on my desktop computer.   Windows 8.1 is the installation that Acronis True Image 2016 is installed on, so I use that for backups of both Win 8 and Win 10 onto yet another sata hard drive (that one isn't a SSD drive though).   

I got myself a new , bigger (higher capacity, 1 TB) SSD drive (Crucial MX 500 model) for Christmas to put Win 10 on , so that would replace  my old ssd drive Win 10 was on.

I used the Acronis bootable media (check your Acronis program under tools it will walk you through how to make this), the one I burned onto a DVD (I think it fits onto a CD too, I realize most people would just boot from a usb drive nowadays instead and you can do that too) ... following Steve's excellent advice as far as not doing this in Windows... I also followed his advice as far as creating a backup of Win 10 and then restoring the backup onto the new ssd drive.   

Check the link above I gave to Steve's advice and note all the things I did NOT do that Steve recommends this is probably why I got into trouble in the first place  :)  .. 

So the nightmares began... first when I tried booting into Win 10 on the new ssd drive I would get the blue screen of death " sorry there's a problem stopping Windows from loading" or something to that effect ... I wasted hours of time on dumb stupid pointless things before  coming across another super helpful thread on these forums that said repairing the MBR would fix this (think it was the MBR) ... I  went the overkill route and did  the following  ... rebooted Windows 8 into safe mode.. selected the troubleshooting option, then command prompt option, then performed the following four commands one by one 

bootrec /fixmbr

bootrec /fixboot

bootrec /scanos

bootrec /rebuildbcd

I noticed with the last command , rebuildbcd (or maybe it was scanos?  That 10 hours straight of panicked work is a nightmarish blur to be honest with you :P ) mentioned seeing the drive that Win 10 was installed on but not the other drive that Win 8 was installed on , I just said "yes" to the prompt anyways (choices were "Y" for yes or " N " for no or " A " for all) ... 

So that got Win 10 to boot normally again, yay !  But then nightmare number two happened.. sound vanished completely on both Win 10 and Win 8 installations despite the fact sound had been working properly prior to that (my online research showed cases where others have had similar problems with imaging software, knocks out the sound for some  reason ) ... 

Checking device manager, I saw yellow exclamation points and the dreaded error 32 error when I clicked on the offending devices for more information... the high definition audio bus and high definition audio controller were no longer working.  Strangely enough sound got knocked out on Win 8 too even though I hadn't cloned that at all to begin with.. not sure if one of the four commands I ran up there messed with the sound?

Now NORMALLY you can just uninstall the offending devices from device manager, reboot, Windows  installs the devices again and presto problem is gone.. and that's what happened with Win 10.. Win 8 however stubbornly refused to cooperate despite me using this trick again and again.. finally my frantic online research turned up the possibility of a system restore point.. and I got SO lucky, turns out Win 8 had created a system restore point for me 10 days prior to my woes... used system restore to go back to that point and presto, sound again in Win 8... but an even better solution would have been for me to just back up my registry prior to the Acronis cloning to a new disk and then importing that registry again, or at least that's my belief.

Happy to report that my new 1 TB ssd drive  is running fine with Win 10 and Win 8 is running properly too, sound is working for both though of course I immediately created a backup of both Win 8 and Win 10 I can restore to after going through all this grief.

So what do I plan to do in the future? Follow Steve's advice to the letter like I should have.. but to be on the safe side you can bet I'm setting a system restore AND backing up my registry too for both Win 8 and Win 10 in case this happens to be again.

I should point out this is the first time I've ever had this kind of issue with Acronis, my many times I have used Acronis True Imaging in the past it's been smooth as silk but that's back when Win 8 was the only operating system running on my computer...  but I should also point out this is the first time I've used Acronis in a dual boot setting, I stubbornly resisted Win 10 for the longest time :P  then only reluctantly installed Win 10 on a different drive to future-proof  my computer  when I heard that Microsoft is officially ending support for Win 8 come January 2023 (which means no more security patches  from Microsoft) ... only because it's going to be such a huge pain for me to transfer my zillion and one programs from Win 8 to Win 10 but in retrospect I probably could have spent 10 hours doing that instead of wasting 10 hours struggling last night instead !  :P   ... yep I get the award for dumbest person on this forum :) ... 

I know it's kind of strange to post a problem and my solution (even if it's not the best solution) in a single post but.. here's the thing.. even without being a member of the Acronis forums , threads like this will come up in a google search as I found out as I frantically searched for ways to solve my dilemma into the wee hours of the night.. it's my hope this thread will pop up during a similar search someone else  might perform who runs into issues with Acronis in a dual-boot  scenario.     

EDIT AND UPDATE   ... even following the advice above I still ran into problems (not sure if it's due to my insistence on dual booting) ... I should point out this occurred with a " ASUS TUF GAMING B450M-PLUS II AM4 " motherboard too so who knows maybe the motherboard is the problem? (first time using Acronis in a dual boot situation on that motherboard which was newly installed in this PC after the original post above).

Got the dreaded blue screen over and over again no matter how many times I followed the bootrec commands above... on a whim I tried "select a different operating system" and discovered I could boot into Win 8 okay, Win 10 was the problem (and yes I used the "verify" option on the Acronis backup for Win 10 after creating it ) ... I tried changing the boot order in BIOS to boot just from the ssd drive that had Win 10 on it

(I should point out too I used Acronis to "clone" my older, smaller 240 GB ssd drive to a bigger, 500 GB crucial 500 mx ssd drive, and yes I ran the backup from a bootable dvd and chose the "restore from backup" option) 

and when I booted from Win 10 I noted the " an operating system wasn't found " error message on the screen.

Microsoft has a fix for this that shockingly works (given the hit and miss nature of Microsoft solutions that they post :P ) ... as I found out I can't copy and paste links here so I will repeat the steps mentioned in that article (if you google " an operating system wasn't found when booting windows support microsoft" I imagine the microsoft article should pop right up thought)

So hopefully you created a Windows 10 recovery DVD or usb drive because you're going to need it (if you didn't try to make one on someone else's PC and pray it works on your PC too ) 

Boot from said DVD or usb drive, select repair, then troubleshoot if memory serves me correctly

select command prompt

Find out whether your disk is set to GUID Partition Table (GPT) or Master Boot Record (MBR):

In the Command Prompt, type diskpartand press Enter.

Type list disk and press Enter.

Look for your disk and see if the GPT column has an asterisk (*) – this will indicate the disk is GPT. If no asterisk is found, then the disk is set as MBR.

Type exit and press Enter.

If the type is MBR:

From the Command Prompt, type dir a: and press Enter.

If drive A: is found and a directory is displayed, check for the \Windows folder in the directory. If it is there, that is the System Drive. Skip to step 2.

If the drive is not found or it doesn’t contain the \Windows folder, type dir b: and press Enter. Continue through the alphabet until the drive with the \Windows folder is found, but skip the X: drive. That will be the install files from the USB or DVD you are using. The most common location is the C: drive, so that example will be used in the rest of the article.

Once it is found, type:   bcdboot C:\Windows /S C:

In this case, C is the drive where Windows folder was found. If the Windows folder is on a different drive, use that drive letter instead of “C” in the bcdboot command above.

The message Boot files successfully created must be shown before you can continue.

Type: diskpart and press Enter.

Type: list disk and press Enter.

Type: sel disk C and press Enter.

In this case, C is the drive where Windows folder was found. If the Windows folder is on a different drive, use that drive letter instead of “C” in the sel disk command above.

Type: list vol and press Enter.

Type: sel vol C and press Enter. (note.. in my case I had to type " sel vol 1 " , or in your case it might be " sel vol 2 " , whatever volume the C drive is on... as you can imagine if you have more than one bootable drive all the same size and diskpart isn't telling you which volume has which drive letter this could get dicey ) 

In this case, C is the drive where Windows folder was found. If the Windows folder is on a different drive, use that drive letter instead of “C” in the sel disk command above.

Type: active and press Enter.

You should get a confirmation that the volume has been successfully set as active. If you don’t get the confirmation, it means that either the disk is set to GPT (not MBR), or there is a problem with the disk. Make sure you are working with the right disk.

Type: exit and press Enter.

Reboot the PC