Macrium cloned / restored images to ANOTHER drive will not boot? MBR

I hope some of you might be able to shed some light on boot issues I'm experiencing with my cloned boot images.

A little background
I currently boot from an SSD which is in MBR format; booting from a UEFI compatible motherboard. I also have a second SSD which is may DATA drive - also MBR. Something leads me to think that mentioning this is relevant, as I believe they affect one another?

It appears that the bitmap image on the DATA drive is messed up. I've recently noticed missing files on that drive when I restored an image for my boot drive. The reason for restoring a boot image is because the boot drive sometimes randomly goes into the "Attempting to repair / diagnosing PC" loop - start up repair or Macrium's own 'fix boot issues' don't work. Neither does bootrec /rebuildbcd etc.

Let's say I've saved some files this morning on the data SSD, then my boot drive messes up in the afternoon, I would restore my boot drive image from last week, but then notice those recent files are missing on the data drive. Running scan disk and fixing errors would usually restore those files, but I have also experienced instances of some files being corrupted when opened. Might be worth mentioning that if I restored a boot image from 2 weeks ago, the files on the data drive (after running scan disk) may be slightly different to the more recent image (if that makes sense?). Anyone know what's happening here?

Back to the boot image issues
Whilst restoring intelligent or exact images back to the original SSD drive would be fine, trying to restore to another drive would always result in "Attempting to repair / diagnosing PC" loop. I've even tried restoring to a 'cleaned' disk - cleaned via diskpart or through disk mgmt. This makes me think it may be something to do with the MBR? Surely a sector-by-sector (exact) clone would have captured everything?

I also discovered there were issues on the boot disk (Macrium throws up error code 9 when trying to verify disk for intelligent clone), so have fixed this error via diskpart (chkdsk) within the PE environment before cloning (and even fixed via scan disk on another PC via USB). So although the boot drive has been fixed, cloning to another drive (whether direct sector-by-sector clone or via image restoration) just would not boot.

I'm pretty sure above bold was fine in the past (was hoping it had something to do with error 9 but unfortunately not). Does anyone know what is going on?

I would suggest you open a command prompt with admin privileges and run:

Code:

powercfg -h off

That will disable hibernation, erase the hiberfil.sys file from the C: drive, and disable Windows 10 fast startup. Also, I would run:

Code:

dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
sfc /scannow

You might have to repeat sfc /scannow a couple times until you get no errors. If the two above commands complete successfully, with no errors, you can be fairly certainly you have a good Windows 10 install. Then try to do a standard backup image with Macrium Reflect Free.

After you restore an image, it's a good idea while you are still booted into the Macrium Reflect Rescue environment to run the Fix Windows Boot Problems utility under the Restore menu. It only takes less than a minute and is good insurance that the computer will reboot successfully into the restored image.

Finally, check the data drive for errors. There are members here that will read this, likely, and are better versed at checking drives for errors than I am.

Thanks for your reply and suggestions NavyLCDR!

I might try and take a look at your suggestions later or at the weekend. Just a shame I'm unable to clone to another drive to apply and test your suggestions. I suppose I could restore from a last known good image, but as I've mentioned, it'll only restore to the original boot drive (in temrs of having a bootable drive).

What I am worried about is if I applied your suggestions on that original drive, it might alter something meaning I'll be unable to restore an image which is bootable. It may just be seen as another drive (which I'm having problems getting to boot with another drive other than original boot).