Dual Boot System
Hi, I have Acronis 2016 and have cloned three hard drives on a dual boot system to replace my aging hard drives. I removed all three hard drives and replaced them with the cloned new hard drives. The system doesn't boot, even when selecting the drive in boot menu. What can be the problem? Each clone said it was successful. The new drives are either larger then old or same size. I have since replaced old drives and system boots as normal.
Ok let start with first question.
The original systems were w7p, w7u, and w10p.
The original boot loader was windows but a mother board issue came up and the board was removed and sent for repair for no sound. They flashed the bios and updated firmware and returned board, still no sound. There were issues with booting. It appears to be booting from EFI now. The only way I got it to boot was to place the first boot drive to p-5 which is the G: drive w10p, then you would see all boot drive OS's, w7p and w7u, and w10p for selection. That has worked since doing that. Changing to boot menu and selecting another drive to boot you don't get the same screen it may say w7 recovered and w7 nothing else.
The original install was oldest to newest first was w7p on its own drive, then w7u on its own drive and w10p on its own drive. This arrangement worked well. The w7p was upgraded to w10p because the particular nature of that drive was for gaming on it and everything was stripped of the OS to make games operate with all resources. A new game was installed witch required w10. The booting of the systems did not change everything was as before.
I have tried to change out just one drive with no luck, that drive was w10p it is set as the default OS. This was tried after Microsoft tried and failed to install the fall feature update. It took almost 5 days to sort this all out losing access to w10p, the main I have everything drive. I couldn't boot to it and had a clone of that drive so I tried to change it out to get access, that didn't work. I managed to get back the original drive by disconnecting the other two. Once I got all the updates straighten out I reattached the other two and I was again back and able to access all 3. I have backups of all personal files on two external drives one 1 tb & one 2tb drive. After all these changes I'm still trying to backup everything on recovery drives. I now have another issue and that is the w7u drive is all but lost I can't access it something corrupted it. Screen shots added.
Michael, thank you for the additional information about your computer setup.
There look to be some challenges here!
You look to have a mix of UEFI and Legacy boot systems as suggested by your Disk Management image which shows your Disk 0 having a 100MB EFI partition and your Disk 1 having a 100MB Microsoft System Reserved partition. This is made further complicated by your Disk 4 showing as the Active, System, Boot partition.
What this means, assuming you are using the Windows Boot Configuration Data store to present options on the boot menu for selecting between the different Windows OS versions, that the BCD store location is on your Disk 4 W10 G: OS partition in a hidden system Boot folder.
As such, you should be able to physically disconnect all your other disk drives and still be able to boot into Windows 10.
If I further assume that all of your different Windows OS systems are all Legacy boot, then this renders the 100MB EFI partition on Disk 0 to be of no value, as you are not booting in UEFI mode.
You should check your BIOS settings to confirm how this is configured for the boot mode, i.e. that it is set to Legacy / CSM first rather than UEFI?
I would recommend downloading a copy of the free EasyBCD program and using this to make a backup copy of your current working BCD store data and check how your different OS are shown.
I use EasyBCD myself on my own triple boot legacy system which has W10 Insiders, W10 Fall Creators and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I also use the free iReboot program from the same company to switch directly between different OS's.
My personal approach with your system would be to take it down to a minimum OS configuration with just the default W10 OS to start with, then clone that OS drive and get the replacement drive working.
After dealing with the first drive, then add back a second OS drive and ensure it is also working correctly before attempting to clone that second OS.
Thanks for your input. I will do as you suggest and get w10p disk 4 to work first. How do you suggest I repair w7u E:
disk 5. Disk zero is a clone of that disk. Should I repair it separate from the rest and then clone it again and then do the same action as disk 4 for w7p disk 1? To be clear this will all depend on changing the bios to legacy /CSM first. I have easy-BCD on all three drives but really don't know all the ins and out of it. So I will back up the BCD on disk 4 with it. Should I then duplicate that backup on the other drives, or create a backup on each drive after getting it to work?
Last question after this process will each disk boot on it's own? I guess after the process I should be able to change out the old disk for the new ones and repeat the process on a new set of disk is that correct?
Michael, with regards to repairing your Disk 5 E: W7U OS - that really depends on what the issue is with that drive? Your earlier image suggests that Windows does not recognise the file system for that drive, showing a Capacity of 0 bytes, the same as the Used & Free space.
It is highly recommended to make a backup of any drive before doing a clone - see forum topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this which documents some of the reasons for this advice.
I would suggest looking at the content of your Disk 0 drive partition J: where you show a clone of the W7U drive to see if this shows a valid set of Windows OS directories and files?
Regarding the BCD - there really should only be one copy of this which then references the boot information for your other versions of Windows and is used to boot these.
If you don't do as above, you would need to get each separate disk drive to boot in their own right and then go into the BIOS settings to choose the OS drive to be booted each time you want to swop to a different OS.
EasyBCD is fairly easy to use to add in your other Windows OS drives. See the images below from my own triple-boot system.
The above image shows my 2 copies of Windows 10 which are on my C: and D: drive partitions (ignore the Ubuntu entry shown on D: as this is the path to the bootloader for that OS, not where the OS is installed).
If you click on Add New Entry, then you can select the drive for each Windows OS to add from the drop down list of available drives. Note: you should change the default Name shown to clearly identify the new OS being added.