Restored Macrium Reflect Image not bootable

Good day,

I bought a new desktop (Lenovo Gaming IdeaCentre Computer, Y710 Cube-15). It comes with a pitiful 100 GB SSD + 1 TB HD. My existing desktop has a 460GB SSD + 3 TB HD. I'd like to move my existing SSD + HD over to the new Lenovo desktop. It seems that this could be as simple as just moving the drives over, maybe even without running sysprep. So that's my plan.

Now, I'm a bit nervous about this move, so I figured I would do a dry run first. I imaged my existing SSD (bootable c: drive), and then restored that image onto an older HD. However, when I plugin this HD into the new desktop, it won't boot; the bios just says "Checking Media Presence....", and won't start. I've checked the bios setting, made sure the HD is first in the boot sequence, but the result is the same.

Looking at the restored image on the old HD on my old desktop, I noticed the "System reserved" partition was showing up as another hard drive (I expect this partition to be hidden). I removed the drive letter associated with the partition, but that did not change anything on the new desktop - still won't start. There are other differences with restored partitions, compared to the original partitions; here is a screenshot:



The original system reserved partition is "System, Active, Primary Partition"; the original other partition is "Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition".

The restored system reserved partition is "Active, Primary Partition" (missing "System"); the restored other partition is "Primary Partition" (missing Boot, Page File, Crash Dump).

I don't know if these missing partition properties are causing the issue, but I suspect so.

1. Is there are a way to set these properties now, on the existing restored partitions? Is there an issue with having another "Boot" partition on my old desktop (or a partition marked as "Page File", and/or "Crash Dump"?) After writing this post, I saw Fix Boot Problems - is this the best way to fix these partition issues?

2. What caused the issue in the first place? Did I screw up something with Macrium Reflect when creating the image? When Restoring the image?

I suppose I could clone the original SSD onto the old HD (perhaps these partition property issues won't show up with cloning, vs image + restore), though, in the grander scheme of things, I'd like to have some confidence that I can restore Macrium Reflect images properly, including being bootable.

Thanks
Jimmy

Thank you for the detailed and enlightening response.

NavyLCDR said:

One other consideration is to partition the test hard drive using GPT partitioning (UEFI) instead of MBR partitioning (legacy BIOS). You would want to do that before you copy the Windows partition over to it.

If I do this, restoring the two partitions with Macrium Reflect will maintain GPT partitioning? I don't know much about this, but instinctively I thought Macrium Reflect restoring might just use the same partitioning scheme as in the image. But now that I think about it, I suppose it does make sense that Macrium Reflect restoring respects whatever partitioning scheme is in place on the target drive.

NavyLCDR said:

The old computer was legacy BIOS (uses an NTFS system reserved partition to boot from). The new computer is UEFI and trying to boot in UEFI mode (which does not use a system reserved partition to boot from, it uses a FAT32 EFI System partition to boot from).

As for the actual SSD, is it possible to have the same OS instance boot either in GPT (on the new computer) or in MBR (on the old computer) (just in case I need to "roll back" to the old computer)? The post you refer to (Windows 10 Windows 7 Dual Boot - Can it be done Solved - Page 7 - Windows 10 Forums) seems to do dual booting, but for two different instances of an OS (if I understand correctly). Or maybe it just makes more sense to boot the new computer in CSM mode?

Thanks again,
Jimmy