Skip to main content

Operating system not found after cloning

Thread needs solution

Hi there. Today I tried to clone my 250gb Windows SSD onto a new 500gb nvme m.2 drive. After completing the cloning process I was met with a "Operating system not found" error on startup and nothing I have tried has gotten it to work. I've attempted checking which partitions are marked Active and removing all other drives (even trying to boot from my old drive only). I'm very sure I chose the correct drives to clone to and from. I stupidly have not made a backup before attempting this, any advice or am I screwed into reinstalling windows?

0 Users found this helpful

Trey, welcome to these public User Forums.

The first action here would be to try connecting your original 250GB SSD via a USB adapter to a different computer and check the contents of the drive in Explorer and Windows Disk Manager to see if all the partitions and data are still present?

If they are, then the likelihood is that the BIOS boot settings are probably set incorrectly!

A further check here is that of the BIOS boot mode being used?

NVMe M.2 SSD drives required UEFI BIOS boot mode but it is possible that your original SSD used a Legacy BIOS boot mode which would have been cloned to UEFI / GPT and the clone process should adjust the BIOS mode for this.