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Windows 10 refuses to boot from cloned NVME.

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So with NVMe prices dropping like they have, I bought a 2 TB Crucial P5 Plus to clone my active boot drive- a Samsung 970 Evo- to for my desktop. The first time, this worked without issue once I discovered I had to enable CSM mode on my motherboard. I installed Ryzen Master and someway somehow this corrupted Windows on my newly cloned drive.

So I used Acronis with my old boot drive- the Samsung 970, to try recloning a functional copy of Windows.  No matter what method I've tried after reading tutorial after tutorial, I could not get the system to boot from the newly cloned drive again no matter how many times or different methods I used. I either got BSODs orStartup recovery instantly failing to try and boot Windows. System File Checker does not work. No DISM repair functions work.  The system wont even reboot into Safe mode on the cloned drive- it just instantly boot loops back to BIOS. Being that it worked once- I foolishly thought maybe it was a hardware issue. I returned the Crucial drive for a Western Digital SN850X. I uninstalled Crucial's version of Acronis and installed WD's. Same exact behavior. Startup repair fails, cant even get into Safemode. Each time the newly cloned drive is recognized, just cant boot from it. Each time, I am choosing Acronis's 'Clone a bootable drive' option.

 

It seems bizarre to me that Windows doesn't have any form of repair function that can be launched from an active copy to repair another drives file system that also has Windows installed. It would make things so much easier since every other recovery function fails.

For what its worth, I've also tried clean installs of Windows to the freshly formatted newer NVME and I can't seem to get that to work either. Any ideas? 

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Vince, welcome to these public User Forums.

Sorry to read of your woes with using cloning but have to say that I have never been a fan of that approach after seeing many other users hit problems in these forums.

My first suggestion is to ask if you have tried putting back the original Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD and undoing the BIOS change for CSM?

In my experience NVMe are normally used in UEFI BIOS boot mode and not in Legacy boot mode as implied if using CSM.  Migrating a UEFI boot SSD to be Legacy boot is not usually successful.

Next, if the original Samsung NVMe SSD does boot correctly into Windows, then you should make a full disk backup of that working drive as your highest priority (storing the backup image on an external USB storage drive).

See forum topic: Steve migrate NVMe SSD where I have documented (with images) the process that I have used multiple times for my own systems using Backup & Recovery.