Restored system image to new SSD - UEFI boot problems
I made an image of all the partitions of my Windows 10 boot drive. I restored it (all the partitions) to a new SSD. First try, it booted fine. Later, after a few successful PC restarts, it couldn't find the boot drive. "Insert boot media and press a key" Once the PC forgets how to boot, it happens on every boot. The fix is to restore the image to the new SSD again. Then, after a seemingly random number of successful reboots, it fails again the same way. (It may be related to having several external USB storage devices plugged in at the time of shutdown/restart, or maybe it's my imagination.)
I've been pulling my hair out for a few days, having to restore to the SSD again and again. I've taken the opportunity to try doing the restore differently some of the times. (There are a couple of Recovery partitions; I tried restoring with and without them. Another time I wiped all the partitions from the SSD (with diskpart) and let Acronis figure out what to do. (It did a good job, according to the Disk Management console.) Another time I manually created the partitions ahead of time, exactly duplicating the size and order of each partition, and directed Acronis to specifically put the partitions from the image into the correct partitions I had just created.) Nothing helped.
I made a bootable Windows install/repair USB drive. The PC has no trouble booting from this automatically, every time I plug it in. I did Startup Repair from this USB drive, several times. "Startup Repair couldn't repair your PC" I went to a command prompt, and issued these commands and got these responses:
bootrec /rebuildbcd It identified the SSD's Windows installation and offered to add it to boot list. "Element not found" I guess this is an error.
bootrec /fixmbr "The operation completed successfully"
bootrec /fixboot "Element not found" again
I have noticed two things: (1) On other UEFI PCs the boot partition is marked (viewed in Disk Management) "Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)". On the problem SSD, the boot partition is marked "(Primary Partition)" only. I don't know how to change this, as I feel it should be marked like the PCs that boot reliably. (2) When the problem PC is working ok, BIOS is set to boot from "Windows Boot Manager (SSD name)". When the PC stops booting successfully, Windows Boot Manager no longer appears in the list of choices. If I choose the SSD with the Windows partition, it still won't boot. (Perhaps the "element" that's not being found above is the boot list.)
I'm semi-clueless regarding UEFI. I hope there's a way for me to manually repair whatever is wrong. Help!
John


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Steve, thanks for your advice. I'm working through your suggestions, as well as other ideas I got from the web. So far, nothing has worked.
I will report back if I'm successful with something, and also if I give up and reinstall Windows.
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I'm reporting back because I have been successful, although I really can't explain why. First, most of the things (I have forgotten a few) that I did that were not successful:
- Tested CMOS battery voltage - ok
- Using my Windows install/repair USB disk, I found I could access lots of good stuff from its command prompt. I used BCDEdit to show me what appeared to be the Boot Configuration Data (BCD), which appears to be a text file. Although BCDEdit didn't tell me where the BCD came from (which folder? which partition?). I understand that the BCD is in some Windows folder on the boot drive, but it gets replicated and put in a file in the EFI partition, where the Windows Boot Manager is. (Since the BCD is also in a Windows folder on the boot drive, it's odd that Windows never boots if I point the BIOS to the Windows system drive itself.) Anyway, using the command prompt I was able to poke around a lot and learn very little. I used DiskPart and noticed that the drive letters were all mixed up from the way they appeared within Windows. So I rearranged them to be "correct," with the boot drive as C:, etc. That didn't do any good, and the next time I booted, the drive letters reverted to their mixed-up state anyway. I assigned the EFI partition a drive letter so I could look inside at the command prompt. I saw some folders and files, but since I didn't know what was supposed to be there, it did no good. Rebooted, and the EFI partition returned to it drive-letter-less state.
- I noticed that there is also a hidden 16MB MSR (Microsoft reserved, the Internet tells me) partition at the beginning of drives containing a Windows system. Some websites infer that Windows won't boot without it. Acronis never showed this partition, so then I presume it never restored it back to the drive with the EFI and system partitions. Maybe this had something to do with the issue.
- There have been 3 Windows system drives used in this PC. The initial drive, the 2nd drive, which I'm trying to replace with a 3rd drive. The 2nd drive has already been formatted and used for another purpose in another PC. Instead I found the initial drive, untouched since I removed it from this PC. (I know this is a lot of drive swapping, but I have several PCs with different drive sizes, so as my needs change I move them around to optimize storage sizes. Until now, Acronis has reliably made this easy.) So, back to the experiment with the initial drive. As usual, it booted fine the first time, and showed me what my Windows 10 desktop looked like several years ago. But it took only a few restarts for the same "boot drive not found" error.
After the above, and another Acronis restore of the Windows partitions, I was having quite a large number of successful reboots so I thought the problem might have gone away. I dared to do some Windows updates, which eventually required a reboot, which failed.
At this point I gave up and started the Windows install process from the USB drive. Doing this actually led me to the solution to the booting problem. Right away I got an error message: "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the gpt partition style." What? The disk is GPT formatted, and should be. I double-checked: I had chosen the correct partition to install Windows on. I had confirmed several times over the past several days that the Windows partition is GPT. (I even found a website that claimed this error message meant "...the selected disk is not of the gpt partition style, so I can tell I'm not the only one confused by this error message.)
At this point I went off in a different direction. I realized I had not reset the BIOS (clear CMOS). So I did. Still couldn't boot; still couldn't install new Windows. BIOS offers a "load optimized defaults" function. I did that. Still couldn't boot; still couldn't install new Windows. Rummaging around in the BIOS options, I noticed a line item called "Windows 8/10 Features." It was set to "Other OS," which is its default setting. The other choices are "Windows 8/10" and Windows 8/10 WHQL." This item has always previously been set to Other OS, because that's the default and I generally leave BIOS settings alone at their defaults. So I say to myself, "Why not live dangerously and try the Window 8/10 setting? What have I got to lose?" I changed the setting, rebooted, and Windows booted right up from its SSD, right in the middle of the upgrade it was doing earlier. It finished normally, and Windows has survived hundreds of boots, restarts, shutdowns, hibernates, etc, over the last two days. I'm sure the problem is fixed now.
So many questions, and this post is already in dire need of a TL;DR section. Let me just close by asking how two previous Windows 10 installations on this PC didn't need that BIOS setting changed from default. It's a puzzle. Actually the last six days have been nothing but puzzles. I've been building my own PCs for decades and have several currently operating here now. My confidence is shaken. This is turning into a rant, so I'll stop now.
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Not sure what to say in response to your latest update other than 'Congratulations!' that you have resolved this very strange issue via the BIOS changes!
Acronis would only touch the BIOS boot device, if making any changes at all in this area, so the change to your BIOS "Windows 8/10 Features." settings are a mystery as to how or why they may have been changed!
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