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M.2 NVme cloned to M.2 NVme

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Hello Steve or anyone else here who can comment on this one.  I just assembled a new Win 10 PC, installed Win 10 on one of the two installed Sabrent Rocket Q 2280 M.2 NVme 2Tb SSD drives as an MBR style disk and all is well.  Acronis True Image OEM comes w/ the Sabrent drives.

My intention in going this route was to be able to clone the drive periodically to have full redundancy in the event one fails.  The clone process went fine.  I am aware Acronis tells you to removed the source drive prior to rebooting to the clone, but of I wanted to see if I could get away with NOT removing the bootable source M.2 NVme, which of course would make the entire process far more user friendly.  So I did what most novices would do, I simply disabled the source drive in the BIOS boot configuration and put the clone destination drive in the 1st boot position.

Boot up to the cloned looked like it was going to proceed uneventfully, however after the blue Windows logo appeared, there was a brief flash of the initial background nature screen when you would normally be prompted to log in to Windows 10, but then the screen when dark and I could see the spinning blue ring indicating it was having trouble proceeding.  I left it that way for about 5 minutes then just hit the power button to shut it down.

I'm going to try removing the source drive, and if the destination clone then boots properly, at least we will know the clone was fine.  BUT....it would be so much better to be able to leave the NVme drive in!!!

Can you think of any way to keep both drives installed but get around this apparent conflict?  I have to think it must have something to do w/ the fact both M.2 NVme drives are identical.  Could it have something to do with Disk Signature Collision?

Thanks in advance for anything you can have me try.

Cheers

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Noel, welcome to these public User Forums.

Cloning between two permanent internal drives can present more difficult issues than doing the same with the intention of cloning to a new drive which will be used to replace the original.

My understanding is that having two permanent drives can cause the Windows BCD to be written to the existing drive rather than a separate / independent BCD being written to the clone drive, along with the known issues of disk signature collision.

I would suggest that the process you may need to follow would be:

Go back to a single drive scenario with Windows booting correctly.

Clone from that single working drive to the second drive when installed.

Shutdown & remove the original drive then test to see if the second drive will / can boot into Windows without being moved into the position that the original drive occupied.
If it does boot into Windows successfully, then you could shutdown and replace the original drive and see if Windows still boot successfully from the second drive.

Once you are able to boot from the second drive, then try doing the reverse, i.e. remove the second drive and see if the first, original drive will still boot correctly?

If either drive will boot correctly on its own, and in their respective locations, then you can consider trying to get to a dual-boot scenario by having options in the 2 copies of the BCD (one on each drive) to allow the other copy of Windows to be booted.  EasyBCD may be able to help you do this or similar BCD edit tools.

If you can achieve a dual-boot situation, then you could forget about cloning and simply backup just the main C: Windows OS partition from one drive and restore to the same on the second drive.

Thank you Steve I appreciate it.  I did remove the source NVme and rebooted but exactly the same issue ensued.  I tried moving the #1 bootable NVme to the other M.2 slot, same issue.  I did decide to try a different freeware cloning software and voila, not only does the 2nd NVme boot, I don't need to remove it, just need to boot to it and all's well.  So I have exactly what I hoped for, and the entire clone operation took 16 minutes.

I had only one large partition on the source 2Tb drive.  What I've wanted to do is partition this into 3 partitions.  I'm a bit afraid to upset this apple cart as it's doing almost everything I could hope, save partitions.  The software is supposed to handle multi partition disk cloning no problem so may bite the bullet and take a chance.

There are way too many variables to know what went wrong with the Acronis clone.

1. I would assume a new motherboard with 2 NVMe slots is a UEFI firmware board. Is that correct?

2. Is your Windows 10 system 32 or 64 bit?

3. You say you installed Windows 10 as a MBR style disk. Did you check after the installation to verify that the disk was still MBR and not GPT. Windows installation media will convert the disk to match how it was booted. If you boot the installation disk in Legacy mode, the resulting system will be MBR and boot in Legacy mode. If you boot the installation media in UEFI mode, the resulting system will be GPT and boot in UEFI mode. This is true regardless of how the disk was initially initiated. But, it won't do that if the system is 32 bit. That's why question 1 is important.

4. Did you use the OEM version of Acronis that came with your new drives to do the clone? This is important because the OEM vendors use older versions of True Image. For example, I know the latest Seagate OEM version is based on True Image 2019 while the latest Western Digital OEM version is based on True Image 2016. I don't know what version of True Image Sabrent's OEM version is based on. That could play an important role in your case.

5. How did you do the clone? Was it done by creating a recovery disk and booting from it or was it done from within a running Windows system? Just as Windows does, True Image will convert the type of disk to match the mode it was booted from. That could cause a MBR disk to be cloned as a GPT disk and vice versa. If it was done from a running Windows system (only available in True Image 2019 and 2020), the disk will be converted to match the system it was running on.

If all things were done properly, your clone should have worked. Later versions of True Image don't duplicate the disk signature on a clone operation, so that is not a worry. However, an old version used by an OEM could duplicate the disk signature. So you can see why I say there are too many variables to know what went wrong.

If you answer the above questions, we may be able to figure out what went wrong with the clone.

My recollection is that MVMe M.2 SSD must be GPT rather than MBR - if so this could be a problem.

Ian