Cloned disk unable to boot

Hi all, I have my Dell XPS 9570 with a Samsung 970 512GB Nvme SSD drive (source) and Windows 10 installed, and working perfectly fine. I want to upgrade this drive to a Samsung 980 1TB Nvme SSD drive (target). So I tried cloning the 970 to the 980 using Macrium Reflect , the cloning reported being successful but upon replacing the 970 with the cloned 980 in the laptop, and after powering on, the Dell logo shows up with the dot circle sandclock turning, but Windows does not load up, instead I'm taken to the recovery environment. Same thing happens if I clone with Acronis. Both the 980 and 970 are Basic and GPT, can't think why this is happening. I also checked BIOS settings and the boot sequence is set to boot from the Nvme. Any hints? Thanks

Hi,yes, of course cloned the whole disk with all partitions, both disks look identical in Disk Management, the 1TB drive shows unallocated space at the end since it's bigger, but that I can extend later on. The XPS 9570 has only one M2 slot, so only 1 drive present when booting. The screenshot below shows the screen that shows up after trying to boot. Could it be that the Nvme driver was not transferred in the cloning process and hence the XPS is unable to detect the drive? However in BIOS the drive shows up

Consider clean installing Windows 10 or 11 onto the drive >

confirm that Windows boots and runs properly >

restore a Macrium image of only the Windows partition C: >

perform a startup repair as necessary >

report into this thread each step >

any problems post images, share links displaying error messages and / or codes




Clean Install Windows 10

Download Windows 10 ISO File

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...load/windows10

zbook said:

Consider clean installing Windows 10 or 11 onto the drive >

confirm that Windows boots and runs properly >

restore a Macrium image of only the Windows partition C: >

perform a startup repair as necessary >

report into this thread each step >

any problems post images, share links displaying error messages and / or codes




Clean Install Windows 10

Download Windows 10 ISO File

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...load/windows10

So if I clean install Win10 into the target drive and then restore just the C partition from the source drive, then the target drive would end up being a working clone of the source?

Samuria said:

Without seeing details from disk manager we cant say were you boot from and what mode uefi or other

Find below a screenshot of Disk Management taken with the XPS booting from the source drive (disk 0) and the target drive as it shows after cloning connected via USB to the XPS (disk 1). The BIOS settings when trying to boot from the target drive are correct, set to UEFI and Secure Boot disabled, Boot Sequence set to the target drive. Both drives are Basic/GPT format.