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Can't boot off of new drive

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Hi,

I bought a new WD internal HD to replace the old boot disk which isn't working well.  (This is Windows 10.)  The Western Digital box sent me to Acronis True Image, so I copied the old drive onto the new drive, no problem.  I then changed the first boot disk in the BIOS to the new drive (named F: drive) and it won't boot fully.  I see a flickering image that looks like it's trying, but never makes it.  Everything on the new drive seems accessible like it should be.  On the BIOS, I went back to the old boot drive, made it first again and it boots fine.  I get the feeling there's something else I have to do, but what would it be?

Thanks for any help,

Steve

 

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Steve, welcome to these user forums.

From the description you have given, there are several issues being raised here.

First, if you have a WD version of Acronis True Image, then this is not ATIH 2017 that is the focus of this forum, but will be an older OEM version that is supported by WD, not by Acronis.

Second, it sounds like you have cloned your old HDD to the new WD HDD and have installed this new drive as an additional disk drive in your computer then tried to get this to boot by just changing the BIOS settings.  This is not the correct way to get this to work.

You should only have one of these drives installed at any one time - either your original HDD or the new cloned WD HDD - by cloning these drives, you have 2 identical drives both with Windows OS and having the same, identical disk signature.  This will cause problems for Windows and can cause corruption of both these drives in some circumstances.

The correct method should be to remove the original HDD and replace this with the new WD HDD - connecting this to the same SATA cable & port as the original one used.   The original HDD should have been connected as a second drive or via a USB to SATA adapter for the purpose of the clone, and then removed immediately once the clone was complete.

The Windows Boot Configuration Data on the cloned drive is looking for the specific SATA controller port as used by the original drive.

Lastly, I suspect that you did the clone from within Windows without using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media, which is not recommended despite what you may have read in any documentation provided by WD.  You should always make a full disk backup of the original HDD before attempting any such clone operation as protection against problems that might arise.

Please see sticky post: 128231: [WARNING] CLONING - How NOT to do this!!! in this forum for some of the reasons behind my statements above.

Thansks for your very comprehensive help!  After absorbing it, I decided the best thing to do was to start again (as you suggested, from the Acronis Rescue Media) and now the job is complete and seems to be working fine.

One question, though: The new HD was 1TB and after cloning, it shows up as the same size as the first HD, 1/2 TB.  Is there any way to get that extra 1/2 TB space back?

Thanks again,

Steve

If the unallocated space on the new disk is at the very end of the disk then you should be able to use Windows Disk Mangement to expand the C: partition into the remaining space.  If it is not then a third party tool such MiniTool Disk Partitioner can be used.

Steve, ditto to Bob's comments. If you find that you have a Recovery partition after your main OS one, then you will need a third-party Partition Manager as per Bob's comment in order to either remove or move this to the end of the unallocated space, then expand your OS partition into the remaining unallocated space.