Sony Vaio Will Not Boot From Cloned SSD

I have cloned the 500 Mbt HD of a Sony Vaio to a 256 Gbt SSD using Aomei backuper and it will not boot.

The error is: Your PC needs to be repaired, Error 0xc0000225

The old HD boots fine so obviously the the ssd isn't an exact clone. Sony do make a complicated HD with 7 partitions which might have something to do with it. The bios recognises the ssd.

I have tried booting form a Win10 usb and startup repair can't fix it.

I am wondering if I would be better off with a fresh Win 10 installation, although I will lose the original Sony configuration and drivers.

Another possibility is to find a better way to copy the original HD to the SSD.

Or there may be a way to repair the Win 10 installation on the ssd.

Your advice would be appreciated.

I have attached a screenshot of the error and the Diskpart list of partitions on the ssd that will not boot

Kind regards
Chris

Good Advice Paul. I have just done a system backup and driver backup. I will try my best to find a way to get the ssd working, otherwise will attempt a clean install of Win 10 direct to the ssd.

Kind regards
Chris

Instead of using AOMEI, use Macrium Reflect Free:
Macrium Software | Reflect Free Edition

Make sure to create the Macrium Rescue USB flash drive to be able to boot the computer from. Clone the HDD to the SSD. Then as an added safety measure you can boot the computer from the Macrium Rescue USB flash drive and there is a utility under the Restore Menu to fix Windows boot problems.

Also, are both the HDD and the SSD SATA, or is the SSD NVMe? If the SSD is NMVe, cloning won't work because it needs to boot with an NVMe driver, and the HDD is booting with a SATA driver.

Thank you NavyLCDR and Igdat for your replies. I am using a budget Emtec SATA ssd, I hope the driver should not be the problem. It is an 8 year old Sony Vaio laptop. I will have another attempt with Aomei backupper. If that fails I could try Macrium reflect. I strongly suspect it is a configuration problem and windows can't find the boot drive. Sony have made a complicated partition structure. A sector clone might have more success; the problem is the source HD is larger than the destination ssd.

Kind regards
Chris

I don't know about AOMEI but with Macrium Reflect you can drag and drop a partition from the source to the target and resize.
In this way you can make the partitions order to be compatible with win 10.
- EFI - Fat32 - 100M
- MSR - RAW - 16M
- C: partition - NTFS (biggest)
- Recovery (windows RE recovery) NTFS 800M. (I've done it big so it won't need to be recreated)

The Big Recovery partition (>10G) is a Win 8 factory recover. Can be trashed.

I've been a user of AOMEI Backuper for about a year after the previous 'lifetime purchased' competitors' product demanded an annual payment. I have my drives - 2 SSD + 2 HD - all in slide bays. I weekly clone my C: drive to one of 9 same size SSDs and at end of month, swap it with my off site copy.

The solution is to NOT use the 'System Clone' option in the 'clone' menu at the left. Instead, use 'Disk Clone'. It works every time. I don't recall how I discovered this. Probably because my weekly SSD swap process shown below failed to boot. The AOMEI Backupper should be able to automatically handle the 'upsize' in terms of drive capacity as the Disk Clone menu allows partition sizes to be adjusted as desired. I used that feature a couple months ago while cloning the 3TB HD on my computer.

Until recently, I always put the 'target' SSD in the C: spot as a means to 'level' the usage across all drives. This also acted as a 'verify the clone works OK' methodology as well. Unfortunately, one of my irregularly used purchased products detects the change of drives and limits it to 3 changes before it decides the product is being duplicated without authorization across multiple computers and is automatically disabled. It likely stores the drive serial number at corporate HQ. So the weekly SSD 'shuffle' has ended.

Also, as a side note: The drive clone software I previously used for a good number of years and purchased for 3 computers had a little 'surprise' for me when I was trouble shooting a friends' computer: Making a clone of a drive other than the currently booted-from, running C: will NOT produce a bootable drive! In other words, using my 'big' computer to clone the C: from my friends' computer to create a new one produced a non-bootable drive! I blew my brains out for more than a day before contacting the vendor (in China, as I recall) and they confirmed the non-bootable copy is a safety 'feature'!

Please check the BIOS settings > post images of > settings

a) secure boot
b) Legacy, UEFI, CSM


In Windows RE > troubleshoot > command prompt > type:

bcdedit / enum all
bootrec / fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootsect / nt60 all

Post images of the commands with results.

reboot > post images of the error message with code

Open Windows RE > command prompt > type

diskpart
lis dis
lis vol
sel dis 0
det dis
lis par
sel par 1
det par
sel par 2
det par
sel par 3
det par
sel par 4
det par
sel par 5
det par
sel par 6
det par
sel par 7
det par
sel dis 1
det dis
lis par
sel par 1
det par
sel par 2
det par

Megaherts, thank you so much for suggesting Macrium Reflect. It has some more powerful features than Aomei. There are more options to fit the partitions to the destination disk by resizing. I made a Macrium rescue usb which is very useful. Macrium helped be to solve the issue (see "Update" below)

Bratkinson,, thank you for sharing your experiences with Aomei. I agree that the "disk clone" is more comprehensive and useful compared to "system clone". I have made scores of backups in the past that have helped me to recover from various disasters. I couldn't help sympathizing when you reported, that one backup software would make non bootable clones from another PC as a "Safety Feature". - I think the "Safety Feature" is just a polite way of saying they want more of your money! That's life!

zbook, thank you very much for your reply suggesting a boot repair from command prompt. I previously tried this and was not successful. I think the configuration of the bios and the 7 partitions are just too complicated for me to understand. Windows automatic boot repair and Macrium usb tools boot repair could not fix the problem.

____________________

Update: I finally found a way to boot into the ssd in a convoluted sort of way.

The ssd clone made from Aomei would not boot; for some reason it did not allow me to restore windows 8

Then I noticed in disk management that the original HD which booted fine was a GPT disk but the cloned ssd was an MBR disk. I have no idea why, I thought that a clone is supposed to be an exact copy.

So I used Aomei partition assistant to delete all the partitions and convert it to a basic GPT disk.

Then I used Macrium reflect to clone the original HD to the ssd. All the partitions were kept to the original size except the largest "C" drive which had to be reduced to fit the SSD.

Then I tried to boot from the ssd; to my disappointment I got the same error. Windows tools could not fix the boot problem. However, for some reason, the clone from Macrium reflect allowed me to do a factory reset.

So I did a factory reflect to Windows 8, then the laptop booted to the ssd just fine. Then I activated Win 8 and upgraded to Win 10. Now I have a lot of work to do getting it back to the way it was before. At least though it works and boots properly from the ssd.

Thank you all for your helpful replies and for helping me to solve this issue. Although I will continue to use Aomei Backupper, I am glad than I found out how powerful Macrium reflect is. The usb rescue disk is also very cool.

In retrospect, I believe I would have been better off restoring the ssd to the factory shipped condition (totally blank) before attempting the clone. After the first attempt, the ssd was converted to an MBR disk that already had partitions and that may have somehow affected the integrity of the clone.

Thank you all for your help.

Kind regards
Chris