Cloned disk unable to boot

F22 Simpilot said:

I'll chime in for the heck of it and see where this goes.

1) Download Ventoy.

2) Format a blank USB thumb drive with Ventoy. It will not be apparent anything happpend, but rest assured there was.

3) Download Clonezilla (Not in any way shape or form related to Mozilla). Clonezilla download

4) Place the Clonezilla iso in the Ventoy formatted USB drive via copy/paste.

5) Boot the USB drive like you would to install Windows. Use the Ventoy menu that appears and launch Clonezilla.

6) Read this: Disk to disk clone

Cloned successfully but same issue, clone not bootable, I assumed this was going to happen as I tried Acronis in offline mode too without success. Thanks anyway

My two cents (having encountered same issue):

I have not read all posts but what cloning software do you use?
I had the same problem using a AOMEI until I found out the problem was with AOMEI and GPT partitions.
I reported that for them but they flatly denied acknowledgment.

The core issue being is your source drive is it a MBR or GPT type?
When you clone it you need to make sure that the new drive is first formatted as a GPT.

Despite that and AOMEI has that setting it did not properly clone. (I guess that's why we are already up to version 10.3.0)
I finally succeeded doing the same task swiftly and successfully with Paragon hard disk manager V15 respectively V17.

Give it a try!

Yes, target drive is formatted as GPT and cleaned before cloning. This issue has nothing to do with the cloning software. If you read the posts, I tried Acronis, Clonezilla and Macrium, all ending in the same issue, cloned drive not bootable. The solution will come by repairing the EFI Boot Manager in the cloned drive that for some reason has not been cloned from the source. Hope this helps

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Pentagon said:

Why don't you check the disk 1 BCD for missing entries?
Whith a "Recovery Environment" it would have been very easy to check the bootability of the disk!
You did not read the Megahertz instruction carefully.

I managed to create a Recovery USB Drive using another PC with same WIndows version installed. Would that help repair the issue? Maybe using cmd and following these steps?

When available post a V2 share link.

antares said:

Cloned successfully but same issue, clone not bootable, I assumed this was going to happen as I tried Acronis in offline mode too without success. Thanks anyway

Okay, do this again but instead use the expert options in Clonezilla and then use the following options ONLY.

J2

Q1

Rescue

It'll be disk to disk. Not to image.

Megahertz said:

My suggestion is to clean the 1T drive and clone it again.

To clean the drive, open a CMD window as administrator and type:

diskpart
list disk (it will list all drives. Identify the 1T drive number)
select disk n (replace n by the 1T drive number obtained with list disk)
clean
convert GPT
Exit

I've done that already in each of the cloning procedures posted earlier, I always cleaned the target disk and initialized as GPT BEFORE cloning

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F22 Simpilot said:

Okay, do this again but instead use the expert options in Clonezilla and then use the following options ONLY.

J2

Q1

Rescue

It'll be disk to disk. Not to image.

Any link explaining how to use those expert options? I know that at one point Clonezilla asked if I want to use expert mode, after that those options will be listed (J2, Q1, Rescue)? From what I found those expert options do the following:
j2, --clone-hidden-data Use dd to clone the image of the data between MBR (1st sector, i.e. 512 bytes) and 1st partition, which might be useful for some recovery tool

q2, --use-partclone Use partclone to save partition(s) (i.e. partclone > partimage > dd).

So as explained here I only mark those two parameters?