Cloned 128gb SSD to 1tb SSD w/ Lsoft Active Boot - Neither drive boots

I was upgrading the SSD in a dell inspiron 13" laptop running windows 10 home from 128gb to 1tb. I used Lsoft Active boot to clone the disk. Once it completed, I booted to the cloned ssd while it was connected via usb to sata adapter cable, and it worked fine. I removed the original ssd and installed the cloned drive directly into the laptop and it would not boot. I re-installed the original drive and it would not boot. I have tried the auto repair tool to no avail. I have also tried various command line (launched command prompt from windows bootable usb drive in advanced options) from other discussions and nothing has resolved my boot issue.

I have attached screen shots of the drives in both disk management and AOMEI Partition Assistant. Disk 2 is my tower's installed M.2 drive. Disk 1 is the original drive from the laptop, and disk 0 is the cloned 1tb drive. I have tried repair options with the drives as MBR and GPT. Maybe I missed something, but if anyone can recommend a solution, I will try anything at this point.

I would like to avoid a fresh install if at all possible to avoid losing user configurations / and having to buy a new license for windows.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!

Hello CupOfJava and welcome to TF ,

Please try booting with just the new cloned drive (all other drives disconnected or disabled in BIOS) and let me know what happens after you confirm that drive is visible in your BIOS by itself and you have selected it to be the primary boot drive.

steve108 said:

Hello CupOfJava and welcome to TF ,

Please try booting with just the new cloned drive (all other drives disconnected or disabled in BIOS) and let me know what happens after you confirm that drive is visible in your BIOS by itself and you have selected it to be the primary boot drive.

Hi Steve, Thanks for the warm welcome.

I re-installed the cloned drive into the laptop, with nothing else connected. there are no options / drives listed under boot options. I disabled ptt and enabled legacy to see if there was any difference between options for Legacy / UEFI and there wasn't any difference. The laptop ran a self test after exiting bios and the results are in image 2. Thanks :)

Can you try with "Secure Boot" disabled also.

The next KISS thing I would do is install Macrium Reflect using your bootable disk, then make a MR bootable rescue USB from it, then boot from the USB with just the new disk, then try the repair option from the MR USB. This can solve boot problems easily from what I've read here.

Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect

Learning how to use MR to make full backups and clone drives is an essential skill IMHO.

My suggestion to use MR USB fixed someone's non-boot issue within the last week.

Where did you clone disk 0 from? Tell me about disk 1 and disk 2? Why does disk 1 have a EFI partition if it's not your boot disk? I'm look at you DM screenshot as the 2nd screenshot partition names are chopped off and practically useless to me.

If you installed UEFI vs MBR, set your BIOS to UEFI only.

steve108 said:

Where did you clone disk 0 from? Tell me about disk 1 and disk 2? Why does disk 1 have a EFI partition if it's not your boot disk? I'm look at you DM screenshot as the 2nd screenshot partition names are chopped off and practically useless to me.

Disk 2 is the M.2 drive of my home tower. I had to install the two disks into it to be able to get these screenshots as neither drive 0 or drive 1 will boot into the OS.

Drive 1 is the original hard drive from the laptop I was trying to increase storage on. I have not modified that drive in any way other than using the active boot software to clone it to drive 0.

I have tried the fixboot/mbr etc commands on drive 0.

I did notice in the second screenshot from inside AOMEI partition manager that drive 2 is the only one with a windows icon on the main drive. The other two have more of a storage drive appearance to them.

Secure boot was already disabled in the bios. I have tried with UEFI only, and legacy in case of it being a MBR / GPT issue. Nothing has recognized either drive as of yet.

I am going to try your suggestion for Macrium Reflect now. Sorry for the long reply, was tryin g to answer all your questions.

Thanks a bunch Steve!

Thanks for the update. Let me know after you try MR and try it with just boot drive - booting from MR USB after you make it.