My cone disk will not boot - Win 10, TI-2021
I have a SSD as my boot disk that I’m trying to upgrade. I can clone the disk successfully to an external USB drive, but when I try to boot it fails and I end up in a recovery mode. When I did the reboot I changed the boot sequence so look at the cloned drive first and it’s clear that is working. Everything about the cloned drive looks fine. Given I have to take the entire back off my PC to change a drive I had hoped to be able to test the process with the old drive still installed.
I have two questions: 1). Do I have to remove the original boot drive in order for the cloned drive to work? 2) Assuming I can get the USB drive to boot, can I then clone it back to the new SSD internal drive successfully.
I’m writing this from my iPad so I don’t have all the OS etc. information readily available. If that really matters then let me know and I’ll provide it.
Bob
Steve, I really appreciate the information, especially the tip that windows won't allow you to boot from a USB drive, or more precisely a USB hard drive as opposed to a memory stick which does appear to work.
I've gone through all the steps. I built the rescue media, I also built a window recovery disk, and have gone through multiple iterations of restore and then trying to boot to no avail. I'm moving from a 256 GB NVMe drive to 500 GB NVMe drive. Part of the reason I've delayed in responding is that the upgrade isn't critical and when it didn't go smoothly right away I had too much other work that needed to get done so I postponed trying until I had more time.
I noticed when I first restored that a partition had been added that wasn't on the original drive. If I remember correctly it is shown as a "private" partition. If I do a complete restore of the disk it goes through the boot process multiple times and then finally says it can't boot and tries some automatic repairs which fail. I've booted from the windows recovery drive to see if that helped and get the same answer although it appears to go through more steps. I've gone through the steps of checking the disk for errors, there are no. The restore has no errors. I went through the bootrec recovery process but I guess since I have a EFI boot process there are not the normal boot records because the answer I got every time was what I was looking for didn't exist. About the only thing I haven't tried is to use the option of essentially re-installing windows from the recovery since it says it eliminates everything else on the partition thus effectively making me reinstall everything which I really don't want to do since this isn't a forced upgrade.
One of the things I decided to try was recovering partition by partition. The layout of the disk is the EFI partition, the system or C partition, a recovery partition, then two data only partitions, and a second recovery partition. The first recovery partition is labeled as such, the second is not labeled but the description says that's what it's used for. Right or wrong I restored the EFI partition, the system partition, and the first recovery partition. I didn't restore the two data partitions for the test. I also didn't restore the second recovery partition which may have been a mistake. When I try to boot from this restore, I immediately get a 0xc000000e error telling me it's missing something required although it doesn't indicate what. There essentially isn't any way to trouble shoot it short of the windows reinstall option. Again everything I check looks fine, there are no errors and chkdsk returns no errors. It's not clear to me what the recovery partitions do in this environment, maybe I do need both of them.
I'm honestly not sure where to turn right now.
Bob
Bob, given that you are migrating between NVMe drives and have an EFI partition, then did you boot the Acronis rescue media using UEFI mode, as this is an essential step.
The partitions you listed for the drive should be fine but I have to ask if you have more than one drive installed in this system? If you do, does the PC boot into Windows correctly with just the original 256 GB SSD installed and all other drives disconnected or removed? My reason for this question is see if there is any dependency on any other drives involved here?
Please see the forum topic here where I documented my own migration from a 128GB NVMe SSD to a new 500GB NVMe SSD with screen images of the steps involved.
Steve, The rescue disk was setup with EFI and I selected it where my boot options are and the others are all EFI so I think I'm fine there. I have a 1 TB HDD internal to the laptop and a 2 TB External USB drive. The system has been booted with only the internal drives but never without the HDD drive present. When I got the system the NVMe drive was formatted and contained windows and other software but the HDD drive was formatted but empty I could take it out I suppose but unlike other laptops I've had this one requires the entire back to be removed to do anything. Perhaps I can unplug it, I'll have to check. I will look at the post of your migration. Thanks again for the help.
Bob
Bob, for my own migration, this was for my HP Omen laptop which came with a 128GB NVMe M.2 SSD and a second 1TB Seagate HDD drive (empty).
When I did the migration, I followed the steps shown in the linked topic without needing to remove the HDD as I was confident it was involved in the OS boot process. I didn't have an external adapter to put the original NVMe SSD in, so used Backup & Recovery to image that SSD to an external drive, then recovered it to the new SSD installed in the single slot available internally.
The only action that I had to do was to prepare the new SSD which I did using the Tools > Add new disk option in the rescue media, setting it as GPT partition scheme (for UEFI) but leaving all the space as unallocated ready for the restore to create the partitions from the backup image.
Note: to get to either of the drives in the laptop - I had to remove the whole back plate with around 10 tiny screws! I have since upgraded the internal HDD to a 2TB Seagate drive too.
Steve,
I'm up and running. When I look at the migration steps you posted I knew immediately that I had missed a step, namely the Add Disk tool. Once I realized what it did, everything made sense to me. I guess I missed it because I've only done this once before and that was 4 years ago but I never thought to look at the tools. I realized I had to have something on the disk which I solved with the DOS DISKPART command. That worked OK if I restored the entire volume but it completely explains why, when I just added partitions, it wouldn't even try to boot.
The one issue I ran into was that I had created the latest backup on the internal hard drive and when I went to restore from that I got a message that said it couldn't look the needed partitions or volumes and my only choice was to use the Linux version. I was pretty sure you had restored from an external drive and I had a slightly older backup there so I restored from that without any issues. When I booted from the restored disk it tried several times, then went into auto repair mode, then diagnostic mode and finally said to boot from a system recovery disk or CD. I mounted that but booted again from the new disk. It went through the same steps but before trying to boot from the recovery disk I ran CHKDSK with the /f /r and /b parameters. It looked like it didn't encounter any issues but the new disk then booted cleanly and has since then!
I still have some work to do in resizing partitions and recovering the data from the latest backup but those are all things i know how to do and I'm comfortable with.
Thanks so much for all your help and your dedication to this forum. You are a terrific resource.
Regards,
Bob