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Cloning a dual-boot drive to SSD

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I have a dual-boot Windows 7/Windows 8 system with the Windows 8 partition on a second hard disk drive. The original boot drive is the Windows 7 drive, which is a normal 3.5" SATA hard disk. The second drive is a 2.5" SATA hard disk and since I am using mostly Windows 8 on this machine I wanted to replace it with a fast SSD that I have spare. The original drive is a 320GB, the SSD is a 256GB Samsung 830 series, which is in excellent condition. However, when I clone the 2.5 SATA to the SSD and replace it, Windows 8 will no longer boot.

It says that the system needs to be repaired but when I insert the Windows 8 DVD and try to run Repair it cannot repair it. I did the cloning with the bootable version of Acronis True Image 2013 started from a USB thumb drive to make sure that Windows would not cause any problems. I tried both with the option for leaving the partition the same and when that did not work I tried it with the "convert partition" option but that didn't work either.

Is there something different about a separate dual-boot drive that makes cloning in this way impossible, or is there some way that I can get this to work?

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Which OS did you clone the W7 or the W8 one?

W7 still boots OK, yes?

I think the problem is you will have two boot managers, if the W7 system was the first installed system there will be the W7 manager which calls the W8 boot manager. I think your problem is the W7 boot manager has lost the reference to the W8 boot manager.

Did you used to get a choice whereby you could select either of the two boot managers to use in booting your OSs?

Hi Colin,

Sorry for the long delay in answering -- I didn't get any notifications.

The W7 was the first installed system and I'm afraid I no longer remember if it was possible to start that. I eventually gave up, used the SSD for something else and reinstalled the original hard drive and it's still working. But I definitely didn't get a boot manager choice. On booting, it would go directly into the new W8 boot manager and offer a choice of Windows 8 or "Windows 7 (recovered)" (which is a typically obtuse Microsoft info, because nothing was recovered, everything was fine there throughout).

OK, the Windows 8 boot manager then was the default and that would also have the pointer to the W7 booting files.

Windows 7 (recovered) means the boot manager has had to remake the BCD entries for W7 at some point.

What I would advise is that you make a copy of your Windows 8 BCD as it is with the dual boot information, and then at a later stage this can be copied back if tinkering with the copied disk version of the BCD fails.

Rereading what you have written, it might be worth considering making the into a VHD. Then you only need to restore the W8 system and the BCD can have the W7 VHD manually added to it, that way you don't have to worry about two different partitions or Win folders.

I'm not sure about using W8 backup to make a VHDX file of the W7 system (VHDX is a VHD on steroids relating only to W8 systems), so i would make a True Image disk image, then use the convert to VHD option, if you choose to try this out.