SATA SSD-> NVMe clone exercise - post-clone difficulties

Hey All,

(this thread has been raised on HP forums under: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Deskto...m/td-p/7340240

I also raised separate thread here: Windows 10 restarts to black screen after SSD clone)

I decided to move off SATA SSD (Samsung 850 Pro) to NVMe SSA (SAMSUNG 970 Pro). This is all performed with Windows 1909 with all updates.

And I am sadly stuck with with cloning exercise. To cut rather long story short: the resulting clone via off-line Macrium image does actually boot okay and all seems working absolutely fine. But any PC restart or - for example - an attempt to boot onto built-in memory diagnostics (and similar other options from Advanced Boot) via restart always results with logo-showing freeze which can only be escaped via CTRL+ALT+DEL, upon which Windows simply boots again. I did try to run in-place upgrade to verify things that way and it exposed inability to reboot to finish things off-live (0XC1900101 – 0x20017 error if I remember okay).

So something's messed up and am not sure where. And I will appreciate your thoughts really on this.

What I have tried and done:

0. Very first original cloning exercise has unfortunately been done within Windows (don't ask, schoolboy error...). I really pray that nothing got knackered on the source disk...! NVMe was installed and formatted / tested when using original SSD as a boot drive and Samsung driver was installed nevertheless.

1. I have used both Mini Tool Partition Wizard (win mode) and Samsung Data Migration (also win mode) - and do not recommend them for this work. I do own Acronis True Image (that I used off-line in the past to clone off the original SSD to the current one with 100% success) but it does not recognise NVMe drives... I eventually settled for Macrium as it allowed me doing the deed off-line and seeing NVMe disk.

2. After cloning exercise is completed - via Intelligent rather than Forensic Sector Copy by the way (does it matter?) - I am booting onto NVMe only. Original SATA is always disconnected beforehand.

3. I once did disconnect other disks I have - it's quite telling that NVMe in Windows is usually shown as Disk 2 in Disk Manager actually (Disks 0 & 1 are my other SATA devices and they jump to the front of the queue). Original setup shows SATA SSD being Disk 0.
NVMe however is shown as Disk 0 when booting off recovery media (Macrium or Windows).

4.I did successfully restore via HP Recovery to a new NVMe SSD in some desperation (there's 3 years' worth of configuration and stuff on this PC - reinstall only to have it moved to newer & shiner disk is really the last thing I want to do) and this has worked, and - more importantly - restart option does work there okay. NVMe disk was shown as Disk 0.
But when I was watching the process I decided not to pursue this avenue as there's thousands of things I would need to set up again.


Current state of the affairs is:

1. I'm back where I've been three days ago, except NVMe remains fitted in the slot and remains unpartitioned.

2. I did check OS on the SATA SSD as much as I could and everything seems fine (I'm using it as we speak).



Further observation to the above - confirmed today:

If I load Windows from the image on NVMe SSD (as I wrote: OS itself after clone loads and works fine - BIOS sees it initially as 'UEFI SAMSUNG...' source - but then recognises 'UEFI Windows Boot Manager' on this drive afterwards), and then restart and want to chose another source via Boot Menu (F9) - for example off-line Macrium Rescue Disk via DVD - booting via this source also fails: in case of Macrium I would be stuck on 'press any key to load from this CD'. The remedy again is to CTRL+ALT+DEL and then repeat procedure F9, upon which everything loads as expected.

To me it all points to something somewhere within the HP PC itself that disallows booting under such circumstances (so no straight full-blown OS load) from this cloned drive? Or NVMe driver not starting / not being registered somewhere?

I did find this yesterday evening:

Cloned Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD won't boot Windows - Super User...

The usual problem, whether you're migrating from IDE to AHCI or from AHCI to NVMe, is that the drivers are not configured to start on boot – they must be already present very early during the boot process, before the normal "device detection" system has been started. By default, Windows only boot-starts those drivers which were needed at installation time – the rest are still on the system but only get started "on demand" in a later phase.

Thoughts? But then Windows itself loads absolutely fine?

I have not tried disabling Secure Boot in UEFI - I did see it being mentioned elsewhere... What's the significance?

Any other ideas I can explore?

I really lost a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of it and am considering my choices - perhaps will settle for larger SATA SSD instead and use this NVMe as a document store (my WD Black is not that fast)?

Your thoughts will be appreciated.

Have you tried imaging the entire disk with Macrium and restoring it to the nvme, using a macrium startup usb ?
I always hate cloning especially if you do within the os. always leads to errors.
Imaging to a larger disk may have you use minitool to readjust the size of the partitions but has
worked for me on several occasions.

Also make sure the bios is set to achi not raid.

Curious...

Install the NVMe first. The SATA SSD and OS will be prepared with the driver for the NVMe.

Have you tried imaging the SATA SSD and then deploying it to the NVMe with the Dissimilar Hardware option in Macrium?
I'm assuming that the NVMe is larger than the SATA SSD. May have to adjust unallocated space.

Don't purchase anything, lol.

Macrium has a free HOME edition... Or you can trial the whole product.

Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free

https://www.macrium.com/products/business/standalone/workstation

Their forum is good, too.

Hope this helps.

krzemien said:

Please note that ReDeploy is not included in 30 trial versions of Macrium Reflect.

That's crazy. You can email them for a license key for 3 days to evaluate the *entire* business product, seems that the home version trial won't do it either. I'm surprised.
How do they expect you to evaluate the product? - it's key based. ReDeploy is an essential feature.

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