ATI WD edition won't clone properly/won't boot. help!
I bought a WD sn850 1TB nvme drive and I'm trying to use the software that western digital included with their dashboard, the Acronis True Image WD edition (2016). I've spent the better part of 2 days trying to figure out how to clone my 250GB nvme boot drive over to my new 1TB nvme drive, with zero success. They're both plugged into nvme slots on the motherboard. Here's what I've tried:
-Running the cloning software from within windows. Before I figured out how to turn off secure boot it gave me a windows error code 0xc000000e error (Windows\system32\winload.efi)
after disabling secure boot, it give me the same error.
The first time, I didn't know to take out the original boot drive. I wiped the new drive and tried again, still didn't work.
-creating a rescue media builder, booting into that, but ATI doesn't recognize my WD hard drive. I've done this with the drive formatted and unformatted, with and without secure boot.
-Macrium reflect 7 and several other "free" software options that won't clone in the free version. updating ATI to the 2021 WD version didn't recognize any WD drives on my computer.
-I found this thread (https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2017-forum/important…) after trying the clone process a few times. I haven't made a copy of the boot drive I'm cloning yet. I could put it on a sperate partition of one of my HDD's but haven't tried yet.
Bitlocker and 'device encryption' aren't coming up in my windows security settings so I'm pretty sure that isn't the issue.
This sort of computer manipulation is towards the edge of my know-how, I spend a couple of hours figuring out how to get my asus b550i motherboard to not use secure boot.
I'm out of ideas other than sending this WD drive back and getting a samsung. Any help would be appreciated!
Hi Steve, thank you for the assistance. I forgot to mention I'm running windows 10 home edition. A few follow up questions:
-All of my drives are setup as GPT partitions. Do I need to disable secure boot on each drive, or only in the bios?
-can I do a backup to an existing, in-use partition on a hard drive, or should I do the backup to an empty hard drive?
-Any idea why ATI isn't recognizing the western digital nvme when I try to use the Acronis Rescue Media?
Asus' bios is a little confusing on the secure boot with it not being an on/off option. The forum won't let me link the website, but it's a technorms website on asus secure boot.
The default on my bios setting was:
secure boot state: user
platform key (PK) state: Loaded
OS Type: Other OS
I change the os type to "windows uefi mode" and delete the PK key (after backing up all of them of course) per the instructions. But i'm not 100% sure it actually works.
Update:
I have found the source of the problem but don't understand it. Below is an image of all of the hard drives on my computer. Disk 0 is my data disk, has my programs and documents. Disk 1 is a small sata ssd I have 3 games on. disk 2 is my nvme boot disk. disk 3 is the new 1TB nvme. I've been trying to clone disk 2 to disk 3.
I unplugged disk 1 and the pc won't get past the bios. I see the EFI system partition is on disk 1 (I don't know why), but I'm assuming that's part of the issue i'm having and need to get that over to the disk 3 to get it to boot.
Ideas?
Thanks!
I finally figured it out.
The EFI system partition wasn't on the C drive I was trying to clone. So I had to make a new partition and copy the EFI partition over, then I could clone it. everything now works like great now, and the cloning software did its job correctly. The issue was user error and not understanding why or even knowing that the EFI partition wasn't on my boot drive I was cloning.
Skyler, glad to read of your success, well done for figuring out the issue with the EFI partition!