My Cloned SSD is no longer booting.

win10 pro ver 2004 bld 19041.264

Holla Hombres, I've cloned and been using a Crucial 1T SSD for a few days. It replaces a 500G Seagate that was doing just fine but couldn't resist the upgrade. And yes it was awesome... for a while. I used Macrium to clone and it left half the ssd unused so I wanted to get the remainder extended into the primary partition. I kind of gave up on it though, never really finding an option that didn't include purchasing 3rd party software. (I know there are ways to shuffle the partitions around with Disk Management but lets assume that is untenable at the moment) So, I settled for just formatting and installing the remainder as a unique drive. This is what that looks like now from Disk Management

(Disk 0 is not the 500G seagate you'll note. This is the unbootable SSD Disk 1 harnessed into my other computer for diagnostics)
I reformatted the original 500G as a simple data partition while using the SSD as my OS. Poof there goes my backup for the moment but I had been using the SSD to do all this so I didn't expect not to be able to boot up again. upshot is it is recognized in my bios as a boot option but goes to black screen regardless of configuration.
Now looking at it with Macrium,

... it looks soo different. (Now showing as Disk 2) It used to look like the Disk 1 here, with an NTSF active system file followed by NTSF primary, another NTSF primary for the recovery partition and then the unallocated remainder.

NOW it has (GPT btw) the FAT32 No Name Primary, the "unformatted!" primary, the NTSF basic data partition, the next NTSF recovery partition, and the NTSF newly allocated data partition.

What happened to my EFI system partition (that Disk Management still sees as such)? And where did this FAT32 part come from (which Disk management doesn't see at all)?
I swear all I did was format and allocate the last unused space using Disk Management.

These images are from the same instance in this device just using the different apps to view the same disks.

Any SSD cloning god(dess)s out there have insight?

AddRAM said:

Did you try Partition Wizard ?

It`s free Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Wizard Free

It`s not that Macrium left your new 1TB half unused, you cloned from a 500GB so half of the new drive will be unallocated

50 people will have problems cloning a drive, while 500 people will tell you it works great.

I prefer imaging over cloning and have never had a issue.

yes. And the current issue? any thoughts?

From Post #1:

Code:

diskpart
select disk 1
select part 1
assign letter=w
exit
bcdboot D:\Windows /s W: /f UEFI

Also, the computer must boot the SSD in UEFI mode. It is not bootable in legacy BIOS (or CMS) mode.

Now *that* sounds useful! Not sure at this point whether I have a “legacy” sitch or UEFI but thank u.

Tekkie Boy said:

I don't use Macrium but your screenshot tells me that you cloned incorrectly.

Disk 1 was the source and is MBR which is only used in Legacy.

Disk 2 is GPT which is only used with UEFI.

And that's why the hard drive has an EFI partition.

You should format disk 2 again but make sure it doesn't get converted to GPT.

I suspect the Macrium with a hard drive converted to GPT assumes that it is intended for a computer with UEFI and therefore creates the EFI partition.



Friendly greetings

Sorry for any mistakes. English is not my native language.

In that screenshot, disk 2 is not a clone of disk 1. Disk 2 was removed from the original computer it was cloned in and installed into a second computer. Disk 1 is the original disk in the second computer that disk 2 was added to.

NavyLCDR has it right. Graphics are of a diagnostic computer. The MBR is the native drive on the computer i'm using at the moment and the mother board is not the one which ran/cloned the SSD. Which is to say yes the other MB (H110M-C Asrock) is the one which is having issues booting with this drive.But more on that below. Macrium selects specifically cloning to a drive type. So it wrote it using the UEFI standard because I asked it to clone to SSD.

What concerns me most is that while in the diagnostic machine (with a much newer Asus Motherboard btw) I see the cloned drive with a hidden FAT32 and an unformatted system part... or ... just a normal System partition, depending on which app is looking. Again, this is the same build looking at an un related drive (on top) and the cloned SSD (on the bottom) but using Macrium and then Win10 Disk Manager.

I am off to a deep dive on the respective motherboards "bios" to see if I can find clues there. Thanks for the interest and curiosity folks.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh I referred to "more below" and failed to get to that point. The drive will not boot on the diagnostic MB either. I set it as primary and it ignores it and goes to my secondary, the native drive.

Please run:

DiskParInfo.bat - Click here to go to the BSOD batch repository to download and run this batch file.

Tuneup.bat - Click here to go to the BSOD batch repository to download and run this batch file.