macrium clone system partition to empty usb hard drive. Does not boot

link626 · 24 Mar 2020

This old laptop only has one drive bay, so I use Macrium and clone the system partition to an empty drive in a usb caddy.

The partition is cloned and marked active on the new empty drive.

However when i transfer the hdd from caddy to laptop, laptop does not boot.

what happened?

Original hdd is MBR, destination hdd is MBR.
I selected OS partition as source, dragged it to empty destination drive, and let Macrium copy it over.

for some reason, the macrium rescue disk I create won't load up in this laptop either. It just shows a blinking cursor when I try to boot from the usb stick.

dalchina · 24 Mar 2020

If you've only copied the Windows partition, that's not a clone of the disk.

That seems to be what you're describing:

I selected OS partition as source, dragged it to empty destination drive, and let Macrium copy it over.

link626 · 24 Mar 2020

i cloned the partition again with AOMEI this time, and the new drive is able to boot now.

Something is wrong with macrium, because I selected the clone function, put a check mark on the OS partition only, and ended up with a nonbooting disk.

dalchina · 24 Mar 2020

Thank you very much for your reply.
How to clone your PC hard drive using Macrium Reflect | Windows Central

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-clone-your-pcs-hard-drive-macrium-reflect

pg 174

cereberus · 24 Mar 2020

link626 said:

i cloned the partition again with AOMEI this time, and the new drive is able to boot now.

Something is wrong with macrium, because I selected the clone function, put a check mark on the OS partition only, and ended up with a nonbooting disk.

Very unlikely something is wrong with Macrium - you must have not copied boot partitions.