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No Boot after cloning

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Hello all,

I have a MSI tower running Win 7 pro that has become unable to "normally" boot after cloning my original 256 GB SSD to a new 750 GB SSD.

I installed the new 750 GB SSD in my PC into a second SATA channel, and kept the old smaller SSD on its' original SATA channel (the other channels of my PC nominally support HDDs).  I do not use RAID configurations.

I created a System Repair disc prior to cloning with the Acronis True Image 2014 OEM provided by the SSD vendor via download (sorry, no Acronis build number since I lost it during system recover).  After running error checking with no errors and then a backup, I launched the Acronis program and started the clone.  There were a couple error statements which I cancelled but the program started the cloning overnight, and then shut down the PC.

The next morning, I disconnected the data cable from the original SSD and swapped the new SSD cable to the original SSD channel.  But I could not boot to the new or old SSDs.

I set the BIOS to boot from the optical drive.  Eventually I found that I could boot to either C: drive SSDs (after disconnecting the HDDS) only by using the original Win 7 installation disc followed by the new System Repair disk. When I just use the original Win 7 installation disc, I arrive at a black screen with a non-responsive cursor.  Then I replace the installation disc with the new System Repair disc and execute a hardware restart, two horizontal progress bars are shown that indicate sequential loading of files.  At this point, I can either boot the Repair Environment (New Installation or Repair) or allow my C: drive to boot.  If I attempt to repair from the disc Repair Environment, I get a cannot repair due to an incompatible version msg.  If I boot to the C: drive, I can (did) perform a system restore.  If I execute a software restart, I can boot to the C: drive only after the Sys Repair disc loads its' files.  If I do a Shut Down, then I need to start with the paired Installation disc then the Sys Repair disc routine, despite the system restore.  I cannot boot to C: normally.  It seems there is a temporary load of boot files only from the System Repair disc, which does not survive a shut down- new boot sequence.

In threads from this Forum, Steve Smith has helped with Boot Repair issues that sound very much like my problem. However, I cannot run a repair from the System Repair disc (due to incompatible version, despite being freshly made).  Other than a new installation of Win 7, can I get help repairing my boot issue?

Thank you,

Marc

 

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This is why the MVP's recommend backup and restore over clone.  OK, there's no 100% guarantee, but with a backup, you can always start over and try again.  Without one, you're left only with what you have at the moment.  

2 quick things to try...

1) you mention you changed the boot order to the optical drive, but did you ever go back and check the boot order after the clone to make sure the cloned drive was listed with 1st priority?

2) After that, have you tried to boot in safe mode?  The disk may be locked for some reason.  Safe mode, may allow the OS to boot and will unlock it

FYI,  you can get legitimate Windows media as free downloads.  I found this awhile back and have used it several times to get old .iso install disks.  http://www.howtogeek.com/186775/how-to-download-windows-7-8-and-8.1-installation-media-legally/

 Microsoft Windows and Office ISO Download Tool at the bottom of the article has been a life saver.  

If 1 and 2 don't help, you should be able to get the .iso installer for your version of Windows so you can boot it and try a startup repair (run it twice and reboot and try - even if it says it failed), or then try the advanced command prompt in it to try and rebuild the BCD with bootrec commands.  

 

Hi Bobbo_, unfortunately I was not aware of this excellent Forum and Steve's [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this!!! post prior to my cloning actions.  Since I don't have the backup, I'm trying to fix.

Re suggestion 1, yes I have my BIOS set so that it skips the optical drive to the C drive if no media.  But I will try changing the order back to the prior default.  However that's where it was when I originally discovered no-boot after cloning, so I'm not hopeful on this point.

Re suggestion 2, when I boot to Safe Mode, I do not see the Repair option (nominally at the top of the list).  My vendor MSI appears not to provide that option.  However, I just read about their rebooting-3X in sequence to get to their recovery mode - so I will pursue your suggestion that way.  

I do have my legit MS Win 7  installation disc and their authenitcation codes, so I don't know what additional download support I will find there, however I will try to get to above mode for the bootrec commands.  Thank you for your suggestions and link to the Bootloader article!!!  I appreciate your recommedation that a bootloader problem may be where my issue resides.

Will update as I make progress.  Thanks again,

Marc

You're welcome.  

I have a gigabyte mobo.  I don't have an f8/safeboot/safemode menu either.  I have to let it fail to boot 3 times in a row as well.  Mine actually BSOD's, says no boot device found, automatically reboots, makes 4 loud beeps and goes to the bios wanting me to do someting. I have to just tell it to boot normal and let it repeat in the same fashion 2 more times.  Then I finally get an F8 prompt from Windows and select it.  That has worked for a locked disk when I converted from an PCIE NVME hard drive back to SSD during testing.  I have to go through that process on this sytem every time (in that particular test scenario with this particular motherboard).  

If it's not a locked disk, the startup repair (which is different than safeboot / safemode), is done by booting the windows installer disk and going into the advanced options instead of installing.  You should have an option to "startup repair"... run it twice in a row and reboot (even if it says it failed) and see how it goes.  If it still doesn't boot, then go back into advanced mode and use the command prompt to try and repair the bootloader with bootrec.

EDIT**** One last trick I've used to work and I wouldn't recommend it unless you take a backup first - better to have a backup of what you have now, than nothing at all... is to use the advanced command prompt and diskpart.  Assign the system volume a drive letter.  Format it.  Then run startup repair a few times and the installer disk should rebuild it when it sees there is no system volume at all.  It's not very fun, but if you run out of options, it might be the saving grace.  Steps are outlined in this post, which is where I got the idea from when I first had my issue with the missing F8 until I relaized what I had to do on my motherboard to get it to appear.  There's one spot about formatting that doesn't make sense to me. The key is to format the mounted drive letter of the system partition (he says to format C: which is what his was, but C: has always been my C: drive so I want to point that out for you - it's the letter you assign to the the system parition that you need to format). https://www.cult-of-tech.net/2015/07/rebuilding-the-windows-system-reserved-partition/

 

Bobbo_ thank you for your additional comments. I'll work thru this.  Actually your first BIOS suggestion helps (i.e. place the C drive first in boot sequence..) gives me a very fast boot to Win 7 - as long as I don't have my SATA HDDs connected. However there are enough other flaky things going on - v slow launch of IE, but normally fast launch of Chrome browser, etc - that something still seems wrong.  BIOS C:-Boot-first-in-sequence is not my default setting for my BIOS (the default for USB-first gives me the grief despite no USB drive present), but at least I can boot to either my original or cloned C: drives.  And I can connect my big USB3 external drive.  I'm running a Win 7 backup to it now althou I doubt I can use it. I'll also plow thru Steve Smith's How Not to Clone... article

Anyway, many odd things, so I may just make a (long) list of my installed programs and reinstall everything from scratch.....

Marc, from your comments above, it sounds as though you are running your system with two identical drives connected?

Marc wrote:
but at least I can boot to either my original or cloned C: drives.

This is not recommended and will cause some strange problems as cloning also copies the disk signature, so in effect both drives present the same signature as well as both having identical Windows installations.

I would recommend disconnecting one of these drives and see what happens with either the original or the clone as the only one connected.  Just ensure that which ever one you have connected is connected to the same SATA controller / port as the original drive was.

If you are considering doing a clean install, then download / install Belarc Advisor which will produce an audit report of all your installed software etc.

Make a full disk backup of the original drive too, so that you can safeguard other data that may be needed.  

I say this having just had to do a clean install of a Windows 7 system for a friend and was able to recover data from a backup image of the problem drive.  Check you also have any device drivers that may be needed for hardware installed if these are not found automatically by Windows, i.e. printers, add-in wireless cards etc.

Hi Steve,

I was initially having problems booting to either orig or cloned C drives (yes, only one mounted at a time) until I followed Bobbo_...'s suggestion to change my BIOS (American Megatrends v1.7) to look for my C drive first.  Once I did that, I could boot to either of the (orig/cloned) C drives, but several things renain snarled.  For example, if I connect my HDD drives, I can't open them in Explorer (I will soon check in Disk Managment to see their status).  Some programs launch slowly, abnormally slowly (some of oddity may be 'cause I installed several programs on my HDDs rather than my original small SSD C drive, but that is easy to fix). Then there's the BIOS setting that is different from my default (i.e. check for boot in sequence on USB, optical, then C drive).  If I return to that BIOS setting, I don't get normal boot behavior.  BTW, it doesn't seem to matter which of my SATA channels I connect the C drives to..?... in my particular case.

Belarc is a great tool, and I had sent myself a mail with my Belarc profile for exactly the reason you pointed out. 

I appreciate your comments on Win 7 clean install.  I've always had problems with Windows Backup, but I finally got rid of old 255+ character file names places that MS IE places in "temporary" hidden folders (I used TLPD v4.6 to list the Too Long Path Directories), and finally got a full Backup.  But the backup is on my current flakey configuration, so I'm a little shakey how to use it.  Can you point out how you were able to recover data from the backup image you mentioned? 

Any thoughts on what to do regarding my boot, HDD issues, and non-default BIOS settings?

Thanks

However just right now my head is rattling with loose screws due to a bad cold, so I don't dare implement anything to fix my issues until a couple more days pass I guess.

 

Marc, sorry to hear that you still are having problems here.  

I would still not recommend having the two duplicate drives installed in the system, this will only complicate matters and can cause corruption to one or both of them.

Do you know what boot mode your computer is using?  Is this a legacy boot with BIOS / MBR  or is it an EFI system that has Secure Boot options?

See webpage: Check if your PC uses UEFI or BIOS for help in this area.  This can make a difference on what you need to select in the Boot sequence settings, i.e. some systems allow you to select the specific drive, whereas with EFI you would normally select the Windows Boot Manager.  So if selecting the latter, you need to ensure there is only one of these on offer.

I cannot offer any advice on why your HDD's won't open in Explorer as too little information to go on.  Are they being allocated drive letters?

For my clean Win 7 install, I was able to mount the backup image from the old installation on another system then copy the various files & folders to a temporary location on a spare external drive then restore these to the new clean installation.  This is only possible with user data - you should not be restoring program data unless you are 100% certain that there are no matching links to this in the Windows Registry etc.  Acronis make it very clear in the documentation that it cannot be used to migrate installed programs - these need to be reinstalled to set all the required registry and data file settings.

You can recover folders holding your email data files providing you know where this is held - I typically use Mozilla Thunderbird for my email and I am able to copy the whole Profile folder structure to get back all emails, extensions, and profile settings for example.  Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos are all fine to recover and move.  Same with Favourites for IE.

Mdr,

I'm on a phone so aploligize if this was stated by you earlier...

How much free space is on the new drive and how big is it? Most SSDs run like crap when the get below 10% free space and many need about 20% to perform at optimal levels. If you downgraded to a smaller drive sometimes this can bite you in the butt.

A couple of other thoughts/tests... 

1) create a new user profile as a test. Is it also having issues?

2)  did you resort to cloning or did you end up backing up and restoring? If you didn't backup and restore, but have the ability to do this, I'd be curious if it works better for you over than cloning when the system boots.

3) I've started recommending everyone use shutdown /p before creating an offline image or offline clone. This will ensure the disk is shutdown completely and not locked with a hibernation file at the time.

4) even though you're using a new disk, I'd run two checks on it. Run from an admin command prompt.

sfc /scannow

chkdsk /f  /r