Cloning drive and editing boot record to use new drive

Vaindil · 18 Jan 2022

I bought a new SSD today, my goal is to clone my current SSD to the new one and use both in my PC. (The new one is PCIe 4, it's way faster, want to use that as my boot drive and keep the old one just for general whatever else.)

I cloned the drive using Clonezilla, I can access the files just fine, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to actually get it to boot from the new drive. I assume the boot record on the new drive is still pointing to the old partitions, but I have no idea how to fix it to point to the new ones. I still have a working Windows installation, I can boot into my PC just fine, but telling my BIOS to boot into the new drive just loads the old drive's C: partition as the boot device rather than the new drive's partition.

How do I update the boot record to use the new drive? I'm on Windows 10, build 19043.1466.

SIW2 · 18 Jan 2022

admin cmd prompt:

bcdboot windowspartitionletter:\windows /s esp partition

If the windows partition on the other disk is m: then the first part of the command is

bcdboot m:\windows

the second part can be either /s the letter of the esp partition on the other disk, or /s the device path of the esp partition on the other disk.

you can copy the device path easily using free diskgenius then paste it into cmd prompt. Click on the esp partition to highlight it. Then rt click where it says Device Path and copy it to clipboard.

https://www.diskgenius.com/download.php

Cloning drive and editing boot record to use new drive-device-pathjpg.jpg

so the full command could be adminstrator command prompt:

bcdboot m:\windows /s \Device\HarddiskVolume6

then press enter

By default it will create the boot files for whatever your current boot mode is. So if you are currently booted in efi mode, it will create the efi boot files on the specified esp partition.

If you were currently booted in bios mode and you wanted efi boot files for the specified esp partition, there is the /f switch

bcdboot m:\windows /s \Device\HarddiskVolume6 /f uefi