Cloning a Windows 10 Drive, why doesn't it work!!!???

Zepher

Zepher

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My friend brought me his girlfriends slim HP machine that she bought a few months ago and he got her a 250GB SSD for me to install.
The original drive is a 500GB Seagate.
I have used Paragon Migrate OS to SSD, Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 suite, and Macrium Reflect, all cloned the drive just fine but when installed into the HP, it errors out with "Inaccessible Boot Device"

I was able to get it to boot into the Windows 10 Utilities and was going to just try and restore the PC but then it gives me an error saying the drive is locked and to unlock it and try again.

I also created a Restore USB drive with Macrium Reflect but when it boots into the Rrestore, the SSD is not listed for some reason.

I also turned off Secure Boot, turned on Legacy Boot, and all combinations of those two and still it won't boot.

I also tried doing an image of the drive and then restoring the image to the SSD and that failed as well, same error as the first time.

I worked on this from 2am till 9am this morning.
I have cloned Windows 7 dozens of times and only had 1 non boot issue.

Anyone have any suggestions, something I may have overlooked. Also, this Slim PC has a really tiny mobo, uses laptop memory and a laptop style power brick.

hp-slimline-pc.jpg
 
If you are cloning to a Samsung SSD they have their own cloning software that I have used tons of times without issues. What are the partitions on the 500GB drive, are you cloning all the partitions? Did you try and fix the MBR or fix boot command on the SSD after you cloned it?
 
Crucial BX100 250GB SSD.
I cloned all the partitions, tried fixing the MBR but it gave an error. can't remember the exact error but it said something about no fixed disk with mbr.,


In this image, the bottom drive is the clone, source isn't shown, the other drives listed are the computer I am on.
Partition 3 was made smaller since the SSD was smaller, the other partitions stayed the same size.
hp-slim-drive-image.jpg
 
Oh, I still had the window opened, this is what it said when I was attempting to make it active.
hp-slim-diskpart.jpg
 
So the problem as I see it is that the source is likely and MBR disk and your clone is a GPT disk, redo the clone and make sure your target is an MBR and it should work. The DISKPART command is telling you it only works on MBR disks and since yours is a GPT, it can't work.
 
ashman said:
So the problem as I see it is that the source is likely and MBR disk and your clone is a GPT disk, redo the clone and make sure your target is an MBR and it should work. The DISKPART command is telling you it only works on MBR disks and since yours is a GPT, it can't work.
Click to expand...

Actually it is very likely that the source drive was a GPT formatted drive. The partition structure looks correct for a UEFI-based Windows install which typically use GPT boot volumes.

My guess is the UEFI system partition is not setup correctly on the new drive and it can't find the Windows folder - especially since the uniqueid of the disk is certainly different and the size of the partition was changed. Have you tried rebuilding it with bcdboot?

Something like "bcdboot C:\Windows /S s: /f UEFI" should do the trick (replace drive letters as appropriate, This example assumes C is the 213 GB partition that the Windows folder is located on and S is the 360 MB system paritition)

Easiest to run from the command prompt of either Windows 10 install media or the recovery tools, unless you have the ADK installed). Syntax information for bcdboot can be found at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn898490(v=vs.85).aspx You will probably have to use diskpart to assign the drive letters before running the bcdboot command.
 
This little machine was a nightmare.
I created a Windows 10 USB drive using the Windows tools, setup starts but the system can't find the SSD, I go to HP's site, grab some Windows 10 sata drivers, it didn't work with them.
Decided to install 7 then do the 10 upgrade with the USB, that didn't work either, can't see the SSD even though 7 is on the SSD.
All of the above were tried with no internet access so I decided to hook up internet, I go to HP's site to get network drivers for this machine, the one listed for 7 is not the right one, so I spent about an hour
googling and testing drivers and finally got ones that worked from HP, but were from another machine that had the same Nic and Wifi card as this one had.
I did the upgrade directly from Microsoft's site and that sat for 3 hours on the looking for updates page.

I just left it at Windows 7.

here is the original drive setup, I imaged it then cloned it on the 3rd try.
hp-slim-drive-image-origina.jpg
 
I just booted up a linux live cd and did a "dd if=sda of=sdb" and it worked just fine for me for 3 or 4 win10 setups now that I've moved to SSD.
 
I'll try some of the tips you guys suggested the next time I try and clone a Win10 disk. I have cloned over 2 dozen Win7 installs and only had 1 not boot.
this was the first time trying to clone a Win10 disk.
 
If it helps any, I cloned 5 W10 boxes recently and migrated them to SSD's using EaseUS Todo Free backup. It has a clone tool, worked without any issues at all.
 
acquacow said:
I just booted up a linux live cd and did a "dd if=sda of=sdb" and it worked just fine for me for 3 or 4 win10 setups now that I've moved to SSD.
Click to expand...

In this case that wouldn't have worked because the new drive is smaller than the old one. dd will work if both drives are either the same size or the destination is larger than the original.
 
I used samsung's clone tool to clone my raid 0 to a new 950 pro - after cloning I got the "inacessable drive" error - booted in to safe mode with network (not that it mattered) and boom rebooted and all was good.
 
I've had a few non boot situations with 10. I just hooked the drive up to my workstation and ran Minitool Parition Wizard and just made the SSD active. Slotted it back in and bingo. Often found the Command Prompt diskpart stuff doesn't really seem to work all that well with 8/10.
 
I've cloned 10 with the latest Acronis twice now and it works flawlessly.
 
wbo said:
In this case that wouldn't have worked because the new drive is smaller than the old one. dd will work if both drives are either the same size or the destination is larger than the original.
Click to expand...
It'll work if you resize the partitions down to fit/defrag and then dd till the disk is full. I've done that as well.
 
That said, you probably don't have a very optimized file system for the SSD as the HDD isn't a 4k (AF) one.
 
SSD won't need any kind of optimized filesystem... it's all designed as a log-structure in the SSD... it's all random and mixed up by default.
 
I am going to be helping a friend clone his Windows 10 drive later this morning. Going to try the suggestions you guys offered if it gives me issues like the HP machine.
Oh, and my friend brought the HP back a few hours ago, his gf likes Windows 10 and just had me reconnect the old drive and gave me the 250GB BX100 SSD for my troubles.
 
I'm not sure how Windows always enforces it however, a 500Gb HDD is most likely not of the AF/4k-kinds.
 
The Migration App I primarily use will Align the SSD during the migration.
I'll be working on my friends machine Sunday, he couldn't make it here today.
 
diizzy said:
acquacow
You surely want alignment for you SSD, please consult with Google.
Click to expand...
Not if there's no structure to the SSD (there shouldn't be in most cases).
You also don't need any alignment on SSDs that are low-level formatted to 512B.
 
acquacow said:
Not if there's no structure to the SSD (there shouldn't be in most cases).
You also don't need any alignment on SSDs that are low-level formatted to 512B.
Click to expand...
Now that's not true. Windows XP created partitions on 512byte boundaries that didn't align well with the typical erase block size in SSD's and the slowdown was noticeable.
 
Stereodude said:
Now that's not true. Windows XP created partitions on 512byte boundaries that didn't align well with the typical erase block size in SSD's and the slowdown was noticeable.
Click to expand...
WinXP? Are you talking about old SSD design where blocks were statically mapped to EBs on the flash? The drives where everyone told you to disable swapfiles/etc so that you don't prematurely wear-out the flash?

I thought we were talking modern flash designs here...

I just checked on my win7/10 boxes and all of my partitions are already pre-aligned on 4096 boundaries by default...
 
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acquacow said:
WinXP? Are you talking about old SSD design where blocks were statically mapped to EBs on the flash? The drives where everyone told you to disable swapfiles/etc so that you don't prematurely wear-out the flash?

I thought we were talking modern flash designs here...
Click to expand...
I am taking about modern designs here. You made a factually incorrect statement that you can't misallign a SSD if it has 512byte sectors. That's completely erroneous. First, no SSD has 512 byte internal sectors in the sense that the smallest erasable block is 512 bytes. Theyre much larger. These are such old topics I'm not going to rehash them.

I just checked on my win7/10 boxes and all of my partitions are already pre-aligned on 4096 boundaries by default...
Click to expand...
Yes, I already covered that in post 21. Do the math. You'll see they're aligned on much larger boundaries than 4096 bytes. Aligning to 1MB boundaries is good practice.
 
Stereodude said:
I am taking about modern designs here. You made a factually incorrect statement that you can't misallign a SSD if it has 512byte sectors. That's completely erroneous. First, no SSD has 512 byte internal sectors in the sense that the smallest erasable block is 512 bytes. Theyre much larger. These are such old topics I'm not going to rehash them.
Click to expand...
In the cheaper consumer stuff, you'd actually have to align to page size, not EB size...

On the enterprise PCI-e side, it doesn't matter, at least for my stuff (Fusion-io).
 
Zepher said:
I'll try some of the tips you guys suggested the next time I try and clone a Win10 disk. I have cloned over 2 dozen Win7 installs and only had 1 not boot.
this was the first time trying to clone a Win10 disk.
Click to expand...
Likely because it was rare for win7 to be installed in UEFI mode on a GPT disk.

The whole world of cloning (well imaging much more so) became stupid after UEFI / windows boot manager etc. :spits:
 
Have you tried disabling Win10 Fast Startup before cloning? I heard it locks down the drive when performing a shutdown.
Also give Easeus program a try
 
Skylinestar said:
Have you tried disabling Win10 Fast Startup before cloning? I heard it locks down the drive when performing a shutdown.
Also give Easeus program a try
Click to expand...
Nope, I didn't do anything in Win10, just pulled the drive, cloned and installed the clone. I did all the cloning on my Windows 7 machine, I just attached both drives to my machine.
 
diizzy said:
acquacow

It sure does, however Fusion-IO hides that for you/does it automatically...
Click to expand...
No, fusion-io doesn't hide anything or do anything automatically... it just doesn't matter in that architecture. Everything is log-structured on the drive, nothing is aligned/etc...
 
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