Can't clone 1t WD hard drive to 500g Sansumg ssd solid state drive
I can't clone 1t WD hard drive to 500g Sansumg ssd solid state drive.
1) I created a Rescue media builder, and then booted from that flash drive
2) I then cloned the 1t drive to the 500g ssd.
3) I rebooted after the clone, making sure I was booting from the ssd, and it gave an error message saying I had to boot from a bootable drive.
a) Originally, I tried to clone when I was accidentally logged into the harddrive that I was cloning. Maybe it caused a permanent issue with the hard drive trying to clone from it when I was already using it? I noticed after that attempt, when I went to try to choose the boot drive in bios, it stopped showing the WD drive model and instead now just said a generic "Windows bootable drive". So did I screw up the 1t hard drive permanently?
b) Is there any issue going from 1t to 500g? From everything I've read it shouldn't be an issue.
c) Could it be the particular ssd I bought can't be cloned?

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How much used space is on the 1TB drive as well? If it is too close to the usable space on the new SSD, it may just not have enough room on it. Don't forget to account for hidden, system and recovery partitions on the original drive that will be cloned to the new one too. If you can say that you will have at least 10% usable space after a clone on the new drive it should be doable. Then again, SSD's typcially need about 20% of free space just to function do to the way it uses free space for caching.
As FTRPilot pointed out too, once you clone, do not turn on the computer yet. After the clone, the old drive should be removed first, the new drive should be placed where the original drive was (if you didn't swap them before the clone already). Either way, don't boot unless only the new clone is installed in the original drive's location. You don't want both in the system duringog boot because the BIOS will see them as exactly the same drive (in 2 different locations) and will confuse the bios as to which is the bootable drive and how to handle the boot operation.
Also... with many of the newer motherboards (i have a Gigabyte Z170x with 6th gen intel processor), you can no longer just select the drive you want to boot to. For me, the only option I can boot into windows is "windows boot manager" which must be at the top of the list. That is why it is important to move the new clone to where the original source drive WAS located as teh boot manager in the bios will just think it's exactly the same drive... especially since I can no longer just pick a drive and boot from it into Windows.
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