BIOS reads "Boot error" after cloning OS drive

I just purchased a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD to replace my 1TB WD HDD. I cloned my Win10 OS drive using Macrium Reflect, as I have successfully done countless times in the past from HDD to HDD, HDD to SSD, and so on..

When attempting to boot from either the SSD or HDD -with one or the other, or both connected to the mob- the BIOS reads "Boot error". Hitting any key will reboot the PC. I've tried startup repair with a Win10 repair disc and System Restore gives an error reading, "To use System Restore, you must specify which Windows installation to restore. Restart this computer, select an operating system, and then select System Restore., no matter which drive I try booting from.

I am at a loss and cannot decide what my next step is, I really hope I am missing something..

Have you tried clearing the CMOS? Changing drives often causes conflicts with stored info in CMOS.

Bob Frost

I have reset the CMOS by removing the mobo battery. Haven't tried via BIOS settings.

Is the SSD the correct partition scheme type, GPT or MBR? GPT is for UEFI bios and MBR is for legacy bios.

I didn't create a rescue disc and my only other currently working machine is a 2015 MacBook Pro; no optical drive. I'm not sure of the partition type but I have tried booting in both legacy and UEFI. I did get Windows to boot once off the HDD before it eventually blue screened and saw that the SSD had less data on it than the HDD. I'm guessing Macrium didn't clone the drive properly. But I'm still stumped as to why the original OS drive won't boot.

You may need to insert your installation DVD and do a startup repair. I cloned a drive before, and for some reason the cloned drive wasn't set as an active drive. Once I did the startup repair, it worked, however, that was on Windows 7 when I did that

I've tried startup repair with a repair disc and it gave me an error, see op. But I think you're right, it may need to be an install disc. That's what I've used in the past when cloning drives. I have a Win10 .iso on my HDD, I'll have to try creating a live USB drive to burn the .iso to a disc when I get home.

You might have failed to copy the boot partition when you copied the drive... I always copy the whole drive vs just the system partition. Windows 10 creates some "reserved" partitions. In some cases, if you had multiple drives, the boot partition might not even be on the same drive, it's that way on my Windows 8 machine. :/