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Cloned M2 SSD will not boot, goes into repair immediately

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I inserted the new and old M2 SSDs into another PC and cloned the original SSD which worked fine.
When inserting the cloned SSDinto the target Laaptop it immediately goes to repair.
The SSD is detected by the Laptop (and should be compatible as it's on the list).
What to do?

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Magnus, welcome to these public User Forums.

Sorry but the method of cloning that you have used is unlikely to produce a working OS boot drive due to the way clone attempts to make the target drive bootable on the system where it is performed.

Please see 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.

Personally I have not used cloning with my own M.2 SSD's as I have no suitable adapter to connect 2 with and have no systems with 2 slots for this type of drive, therefore I have always used Backup & Recovery to migrate to a new or larger drive.

The steps in outline are as follows:

  1. Create the Acronis Rescue Media (use the Simple option for WinPE)
  2. Test booting your laptop from the rescue media, ensuring you understand how to boot in UEFI mode and can 'see' your current SSD drive and an external backup drive to hold a full disk backup image.
  3. Make a new full Disk backup of the working SSD to an external drive as a one-off backup action.
  4. Shutdown the laptop, remove the current SSD and replace by the new SSD.
  5. Boot from the Acronis Rescue Media with your backup drive connected.
  6. Recover the Backup from step 3. to the new SSD.
  7. Check the Log messages before exiting from the rescue media (all logs are lost on exit) to check all is OK.
  8. If all ok, disconnect the external drive, remove the rescue media and restart the laptop normally from the new SSD.
  9. When you have confirmed all is ok with the new SSD, make a new backup again to include any new device drivers installed for the new SSD.

Note: if your new SSD is larger than the original 256GB SSD, then you may find that ATI has not expanded the C: OS partition to use the full new size of the new SSD.  If so, then this is quite simple to resolve as below:

First, download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software, install this, then use it to move the Windows Recovery partition (that is shown after the C: OS partition) to the end of the available unallocated space. 

Next, resize the C: OS partition to use the available unallocated space.

When doing the restore of your backup, this needs to be done as a Disk & Partition restore and at the top Disk selection level.

Please see forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document which shows a step-by-step tutorial for doing this type of recovery / restore.

I agree with Steve Smith on the best way to "clone" a M.2 drive. Even though I have multiple M.2 slots on my 3 of my PCs the suggested approach is what I would call a fail-safe approach.

Ian