Cloned drive will not boot on new dissimilar hardware
Just got a new motherboard and CPU but drive from old system will not boot (not recognized as bootable). Created a bootable USB with Acronis Universal Restore Media Builder, booted from USB with hard drive connected but when attempting the upgrade, it said that there were drivers missing. The new motherboard came with a driver CD but the Chipset folder only has an EXE file (AMD_Chipset_Software and ASUS Setup). I tried extracting the drivers using 7-Zip but can't seem to find any drivers. Below is a screenshot of what is in the extracted folder. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Steve, first of all THANK YOU for your reply. I appreciate you taking the time. I also didn't get a notification that you replied to my question so sorry for the delay in response. As you can tell, I am a novice when it comes to this. I am knowledgeable enough to change the hardware but the software is above my paygrade. I checked my system and, as you pointed out, my hard drive is formatted MBR (had to find out how to check it out). I included a screen shot below. The motherboards are both Asus and both support UEFI/GPT (the new one is the TUF Gaming X570+) with a Ryzen 7 CPU which I purchased because my original CPU was not Windows 11 compatible. My original system is still operational and I used Clone Disk to create a copy of my hard drive. I tested it in my old system and it boots fine so I know the clone was successful I have the new motherboard set up on a bench and plugged the cloned drive into it and it says that there are no bootable drives available. That is when I started researching and found the article you also sent me about Acronis Universal Restore media. I created a bootable USB drive with it and the new system booted from it but when I tried to apply it to the new drive, it said that I was missing drivers. I assumed they were on the CD that came with the new motherboard but there were only EXE files to install once the system is up and running so that is where I am stuck. I guess my next question is: can I take the cloned hard drive (even if I have to re-clone it) from my old system, and convert it to GPT using the Universal Restore media to have it boot on the new system without losing all of my data and programs? Thanks again for your help. I really appreciate it.
Peter, thanks for the further information.
Windows 11 requires UEFI with Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 to be used and will never allow your Legacy / MBR cloned disk drive & OS to work!
I have looked on the ASUS website for your motherboard and the only device drivers I could find were for older versions of the software available as downloads (after extracting files from zip and exe files using 7zip).
My own approach for this situation would be to perform a clean install of Windows 10 (or 11) on the new motherboard using a new disk drive, get this setup with all the device drivers by installing the latest drive exe files from the ASUS website, then extract the required drivers from that installation.
Once you have a working system, you then have the choice of doing a further clean install of your applications and porting across your user data, or else taking the extracted drivers and applying them to the AUR media.
The conversion from Legacy / MBR to UEFI / GPT needs to be performed by first making an ATI backup image from the old PC to an external disk drive to be used to restore to the new PC later.
Next install ATI on the new PC and use this to create the 'Simple' WinPE version of the main ATI rescue media so that this picks up the device drivers from the new PC Windows Recovery Environment, plus create a new copy of the Universal Restore media along with extracted drivers.
Once you have the boot media from the new PC, then you would need to boot the new PC with the main ATI media in UEFI boot mode and first restore the disk backup from the old PC which will migrate it from Legacy to UEFI.
Once the backup is restored, you should then be able to use AUR to apply any further required device drivers to the restored OS image.
Peter,
Windows 10 and 11 both have a tool to convert and Legacy/MBR disk to UEFI/GPT. For Windows 11 you must convert the disk so that Windows 11 will work. This Windows tool is called MBR2GPT and is located in the C:\Windows\System32 folder. The links below contain more on the tool
My suggestion for you is to first create a backup of your old drive on the old machine as a safety net in case things go wrong. After that use the old system to convert the disk from Legacy/MBR to UEFI/GPT. Once that is done and you know the disk works then create another backup of the disk on the old PC.
At this point you can then clone the old disk to the new one and see if it will boot. If not then I would suggest restoring the last backup file you created to the new disk and attempt to boot again. During these boot attempt be patient as Windows will search for the drivers it needs to run during the boot process and that can take some time to complete.
Thank you both Steve and Enchantech for your time and expertise. I ended up using MBR2GPT which proved to be pretty simple. I never even realized that I wasn't using GPT all of these years. I guess when I did my last motherboard/CPU upgrade, I simply took my old MBR drive and put it into the new system and all stayed the same. I'm still not out of the woods because the system keeps shutting down on me so I still have some work to do but at least that solves the booting problem. Thanks again.
Peter,
Have a look in Windows Device Manager for any yellow exclamations. These will indicate missing or incorrect drivers that you need to fix. It is likely that you need chipset drivers installed to get past the shutdowns
Thanks again for taking the time to reply. I really think it is a hardware problem. I hope the place I bought the parts from can help me out. Not only won't my drive boot (I can get to the desktop but as soon as I try to install the video drivers it shuts off) but I put a new hard drive in and am trying to install Windows 10 from scratch and that won't work either. The motherboard lights and RAM lights stay lit but the CPU fan shuts down and the system is off. The power button won't even turn it back on. I have to kill the power completely, then turn it on again. Again, I'm a novice but have installed many motherboards, CPU's, etc, and have never seen anything like this before. Unfortunately, I have no way of telling if it's the motherboard or possibly incompatible RAM (they're DDR 3200 and the manual says to use 2666 or 3200 with overclocking). I did a little research and most seem to say that I can go with the 3200 even though I'm not overclocking and it won't make a difference just not utilize the potential of the 3200. Again, thank you for your insight.
Well, that sounds like you could have a faulty power supply. Best to take it to a shop and have it tested.
Peter, definitely sound like a power supply problem. Had a similar problem about 2 weeks ago. The problem with power supply issues is they can creep up on you as the power supply deteriorates. In my case I suspect it "killed" one of my RAM modules. Put in spare modules and it worked for a while than had similar symptoms to yours.
Put in a spare power supply and all now seems to be well.
Ian