Computer won't boot from cloned hard drive.

[celery52]

I bought a ssd with the intent of cloning my hdd. I used Macrium Reflect and after some trial and error, got the process completed. Through the usb to sata cable, the computer is recognizing the new drive and all the data as F:.

When I swapped the drives, the bios says it can't boot because there's no hard drive. I put the old drive back in and checked disk management. The old drive says the main partition contains "boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition" while the primary section of the new drive just says "primary partition." The drive I was cloning was a little bigger in capacity, but I didn't fill up the drive anyway, so I reallocated the space in Macrium.

I assume that for some reason Windows 10 didn't get ported over to the new drive. In reading some similar threads that popped up, other people had luck using another cloning software. I'll give that a shot, but if anyone has suggestions in the mean time, comment away.

 

[celery52]

I tried AMOES or whatever it's called. I suppose I should have tried to swap the drives, but I didn't see the "boot" description in disk manager again. I'm making a Windows boot drive from an external hard drive I have to try to install Windows on the ssd first and then I'll reclone and try it that way.

 

[TerryLaze]

Ever since windows 7 windows uses a separate partition for the boot files and all the info on how to start up the system are located there,you will have to either clone that partition as well or even better turn your cloned ssd drive into a boot partition.
If you want to try it out search for the community edition of easybcd.

Proper way of going about cloning a drive is to create the boot (recovery) partition first and then clone the windows partition to the remaining empty space.

 

[celery52]

I reformatted/repartitioned the ssd again to reclone the hdd with Macrium again. This time it got the OS as well and it seems to be working now. I can't say I have an explanation for it....I was going to boot off of the external hd I made into a recovery disk and windows came right up after I restarted with the ssd plugged into the internal sata.

I'm backing up pics, movies, and music again right now, but it seems things are solved.