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Cloned drive won't boot

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I am using Acronis 2018. I cloned my W10 SSD to a WD drive. The cloning process was successful.

I disconnected the original drive and connected the cloned drive using the same cables as the SSD.

W10 will not boot. Tried several times - get the motherboard splash screen and that is it.

Also as I am really using the clone as a backup and would clone to it again if -  I connect it as a secondary drive W10 won't boot at all. Would the fix for this problem be to use a USB external box to clone to again??

Thanks for any help - Marty

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Marty, welcome to these public User Forums.

What process did you use for cloning the drive?
Was this from within Windows using the ATI 2018 Active Cloning feature?
Did you boot from the Acronis Rescue Media to clone offline from Windows?

What type of computer is involved here?
Is this a desktop / tower or a laptop / notebook type PC?

How does your Windows 10 OS boot from the BIOS?
Is this UEFI / GPT where the BIOS boot device is 'Windows Boot Manager'?
Is this Legacy / MBR where the BIOS boot device is the actual disk drive name / make?

Microsoft do not permit Windows to boot from external USB devices other than Windows PE used for install or rescue media.

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

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.

See forum topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this - which was written after dealing with many cloning issues in the forums.  

Thanks for the links. Went over everything I did and it was all according to guide lines.

I built the computer myself:

Asus Z170 deluxe mobo

Intel i7 - 6700k CPU @400Ghz

Corsair 16MB DDR4 @2933Mhz.

Samsung Pro 1TB SSD

Decided to re-clone in case I missed something. Same result. Sat there looking at the screen trying to figure out what to do. Sat there long enough and W10 did come up. Tried it again - took over 5 minutes for windows to fully load from post beep.

Cloned a second WD drive that was new - same result - 5+ minutes for full load.

Both drives were fully functional.

With my normal setup full load is under 60 seconds.

Will pick up another SSD in the future.