After cloning, both original and clone won't boot without Windows 7 product DVD
I tried auto cloning my Windows 7 Ultimate C: drive with Acronis True Image 2015 (Paid Product) from a Corsair Force 120GB SSD to a Samsung 840EVO 250GB SSD. The cloning operation seems to go OK, no errors. The program shut down the machine. I removed the original C: drive and moved the new cloned drive to original C: drive's cables and tried to boot. I got the dreaded message: "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key...".
Neither the original SSD or the new cloned SSD will boot without the Windows 7 product disk in the DVD drive. When it says "Press any key to boot from CD", I just do nothing, it times out and boots successfully from the SSD.
This tells me the boot sector, MBR, BCD, or some files required by the boot process have been corrupted by the Acronis product. Why it writes at all to the original disk is beyond my comprehension. Be that as it may... I've tried using the Windows 7 product disk to fix the boot process many many times. I've tried re-installing the MBR and re-creating the BCD. Nothing I do seems to have any effect at all.
I am very very disappointed in the Acronis product, which is supposed to make this super simple, but ended up not only creating an unbootable clone disk, but also hosed my original C: drive. Isn't there a script or procedure I can follow to lay down new boot sectors, MBR, and BCD? It seems like the OS should have a program to automate analysis of this stuff and automatically fix it if it's broken, but the tools provided by Microsoft are crap, and this Acronis product is a failure.
Help!