Disk not bootable after backup and restore
Hello,
I’ve browsed a lot of the similar topics in the forum and tried all the advice, but still cannot get the new SSD to boot.
I have an Asus Imaginebook with a 128GB SSD. I bought a new WD 1TB Nvme SSD and downloaded the True Image WD edition. I had to take it out of Win 10 S-mode in order to use ATI.
I originally tried to clone the old drive with the new drive in a USB enclosure. I saw later in the KB that this won’t work, and of course it did not. Unfortunately, when I mount the old drive in the USB enclosure, the laptop doesn’t recognize it. So cloning is out.
I created a USB recovery key with ATI. I then backed up (with ATI) the old drive to a 128GB thumb drive. I’ve ensured that the recovery key boots in UEFI mode. I’ve ensured that secure boot is turned off in the system BIOS. With the new SSD installed, I used ATI to do the recovery, and success is reported. However, nothing I try will make the new C: bootable.
The recovery looks fine. I can browse the contents of the recovered drive in the command prompt. When I swap the old drive back in to the laptop and put the 1Gb SSD into the USB enclosure, I can view the partition info of the new drive in Windows Computer Management. The partitions are all there. The C: partition on the recovered 1TB drive just doesn’t show as bootable.
I even got desperate and tried the manual boot repair methods. Bootrec did not work (access denied when attempting bootrec /fixboot). Bcdedit and Bcdboot appear to be successful, but ultimately do not make the new C: partition bootable.
Stuck. Many hours spent on this.
Thanks for any help.


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You may want to check that Microsoft Boot Manager is selected as the number 1 device in your machine bios settings Boot Order. See pages 61 and 62 of your user manual.
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Enchantech wrote:You may want to check that Microsoft Boot Manager is selected as the number 1 device in your machine bios settings Boot Order. See pages 61 and 62 of your user manual.
Thanks for your reply. I didn't mention it in my previous message, but yes, I've made sure that the windows boot manager is listed first. The new partition created by ATI is simply not being created to be bootable.
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Steve Smith wrote:Which type of Rescue Media have you created to use with this laptop system?
Steve, thanks for your reply.
I used ATI to create the rescue media. I have not had any trouble booting with it, and I've been able to select it as a UEFI boot in the BIOS.
The recovery also seems to have proceeded as described in the KB article, so I'm not sure what else to do.
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Bob, understand that you created the rescue media via the Acronis Rescue Media Builder but which option did you choose when doing so?
For the ATI 2018 & later version rescue media, there are 3 different versions available:
Simple: created based on your Windows Recovery Environment for WinPE media.
Advanced: created based on Windows ADK (or AIK for earlier OS versions) - WinPE media.
Advanced: created based on a small Linux distro OS (BusyBox) or created from the .ISO CD image download from your Acronis Account page.
Further question, is the new 1TB NVMe SSD a direct replacement for the original 128GB SSD, i.e. are both SSD's NVMe drives?
Are there any other drives installed in this PC? If yes, have you tried doing the restore to the new SSD with all other drives removed temporarily?
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Bob,
You should make certain that your laptop is compatible with the NVMe drive you are using. Many laptop makers products will only work with genuine parts.
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Thanks again for the replies. I will try to answer all questions in this message.
>WD edition appears to be 2020. I interrogated the true image executable in Explorer and it says version 24.
>It was nearly two weeks ago, so I’m not sure I chose ‘simple’ when creating the rescue media, but I’m not sure why I would have chosen anything else. I can recreate the rescue media and try again though.
>This Asus model only has one drive bay, so I can only have the old drive or the new drive installed. I have attempted recovery with the new drive installed, the rescue media in one USB port and the backup in another USB port. To recap, recovery states success, but disk doesn’t boot. When rebooting with rescue media, I can browse the ‘recovered’ drive in the command prompt and everything appears to be there. The C: partition just isn’t bootable.
>I do not know if the old drive is Nvme. I suspect not, because I have not been able to access the old drive when installed in the external Nvme enclosure.
>I do not know if Nvme is explicitly supported by this computer, but the BIOS recognizes it and the recovery writes to it. Asus is not very informative with technical details like this; the best I got from them was that the computer supported up to a 2TB M.2 2280 SSD.
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Bob,
I see that your device has a storage driver update available, have you tried to install it?
Doing so and then rebuilding the boot media Simple version should carry this driver support with it. It could be that the lack of an updated driver is at root of your problem.
My comment about the WD drive compatibility was that some OEM's use proprietary parts that have firmware to identify the part as a genuine OEM product. If a part is installed that does not have this firmware signature the PC will not work with it even though it may actually be compatible.
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Update:
I recreated rescue media using the 'simple' option, installed the storage drive update and did a fresh backup with ATI.
After attempting recovery to the new drive, the same symptoms persisted. The recovered drive was not bootable, but the contents could be browsed from the rescue media command prompt.
Bootrec /scanos still reported there were no valid Windows installations.
On a whim from advice from some other website, I ran a chkdsk. Chdsk reported no problems and did not claim to have fixed anything. However, after that, the new drive was bootable.
So technically this is working, though I'm not sure how.
Thanks again for your help.
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Bob, glad to hear that your system now appears to be working. File system problems and other disk integrity issues can result in a clone, or backup and recovery resulting in a PC that does not work. There are several reports of problems due to SSD being dead on arrival.
With M.2 drives things are complicated by there being (at least) three different types, there are NVMe [PCI Express using NVMe], AHIC [PCI Express using AHCI] and SATA. Some PCs support multiple types of M.2 drives, others only support one - although you may be physically able to install unsupported types due to the keying of the M.2 port.
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Chkdsk is known to fix errors on disk even though I may not tell you what it fixed. There are some things that the utility sets that are not actually errors but more defaults that could have been at play here. It is possible that the clone attempt you ran to begin with may have set something on the disk that needed to be reset to default which chkdsk remedied that enabled your success.
Thanks for reporting back
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