Black screen (cursor only) - safe mode same result

Hi all -

I have an older machine which I use off-site. It's been working fine so far (dual boot, Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS and Win 10, latest updates installed).

However, it's slow. So, to speed it up, I replaced the boot drive (old-school HD) with an SSD. As they're different sizes, I used the Linux gparted utility to copy (clone) the partitions over to the new drive. Yes, I copied the C: partition and the WinRE partitions in the same place, in the same order, to the new drive, and the boot flag is set on C: and msftres flag set on the recovery partition. The drive is formatted MBR (this old machine doesn't even have a UEFI option). The C: partition is the first one on the drive.

This is a desktop PC with an NVidia graphics card, one external monitor (HDMI).

Win10 booted fine off the old HD (and still does, if I plug it back in).

After the SSD was set up, Linux booted fine, no problems.

With Win10, I got the expected 0xc000000e error, which I took care of via one of several YouTube video tutorials.
Now, it boots to the logo screen, then the circling dots and a mouse cursor (which does move). That's it, nothing else, keeps doing this ad-infinitum.
If I try to get into safe mode (via booting to Win logo/shutting off 3x), same result (just a larger cursor, assume because safe mode uses a lower screen resolution).

I have tried using a different monitor, using the VGA output instead of HDMI, tried the Win+P tricks mentioned in other threads on this forum. No joy. I don't see any reason why the graphics drivers would have been corrupted.

I booted from an install DVD and went into command prompt, did chkdsk c: /f/r - no errors, completed cleanly.

Any thoughts (and please don't say do a clean install...!)? Again, if I plug the old drive back in, as the boot drive, Windows boots up OK.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks to both of you, much appreciated!

The SSD is actually smaller than the old HD, but I have a couple of other HDs in the machine, so wound up moving a couple of partitions. Macrium was a good idea if it had been the other way around.

Anyway - Spunk, I didn't do it exactly the way your linked post suggested, but it gave me an idea, which DID work. Had it not, I would have started over and done it the way that was suggested.

Since the Windows partitions were the first two on the HD, I used Linux's dd utility (booted from a SystemRescue CD USB drive) to copy the just the boot sector, the 3-sector buffer afterward, and exactly the number of sectors in the Windows partitions to the SSD. I then used the gparted utility to clone the Linux boot and data partitions to the SSD. Voila - both OS booted the first time, didn't have to reinstall the bootloader (grub), either. After updating everything to the latest and greatest, I cloned the SSD to a backup HD. All good to go. Machine is much faster now. That SSD saved it from the e-recycler!

Thnaks again!

SoFine409 said:

Usually when you get a boot up to a black screen with only a flashing cursor it means that the partition your trying to boot to is an incorrect partition type. I’ve had to use Bootice to fix this in the past.

Hmmm...didn't change partition types (just cloned the partitions with gparted) and did maintain the correct flags when I did it the first time. In any case it's working now. Thanks!