Macrium Reflect Cloned Drive Does Not Boot in New HP Laptop

MikeEEE · 10 Mar 2024

(Note this is for Windows 10)

I have a similar situation to this thread:
Cloned drive won’t boot up

I recently purchased a new HP laptop:
Amazon.com: HP 2023 Newest Laptop Pavilion 17.3" HD+ Laptop Computer, AMD Ryzen 3 7320U(Up to 4.1GHz, Beat i3-1125G4), AMD Radeon Graphics, 8GB DDR5 RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD, WiFi 6, HDMI, Numeric Keypad, Windows 11 : Electronics

We have an older (very slower) Acer that we are replacing. It has an SSD drive. The HP has a NVME drive. I purchased an adapter to plug the NVME into the Acer's USB and cloned the C: drive to the NVME via USB.

Everything looks and feels like it worked. I put the NVME into the HP but it no longer boots, saying it has a 3F0 Hard Disk Error:

https://i.imgur.com/L5u8WeA.png

I've gone into Macrium's rescue boot and "Fixed boot problems" but nothing seems to work. The drive is detected and there. I've run the BIOS test on it and everything seems OK, it just does not see the boot option.

I am open to any suggestions on how I can get a bootable drive to be seen here. Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

Samuria · 10 Mar 2024

Did you clone the drive or just c it's likely it needs other partition to boot second problem the old drive was likely MBR but new pc will be set to uefi and a gpt disk. Didn't new pc come with windows 11 I hope you took a disk image your only action is do a clean installation of 11 if that's what it came with old disk may not have drivers for new pc hardware

MikeEEE · 10 Mar 2024

Samuria said:

your only action is do a clean installation of 11

Thank you for your assistance Samuria. I was trying to save me some work but we saw where that landed me. �� What is the recommended way of upgrading to a new laptop with Windows 10 while retaining all settings and installed applications? We're not interested in Windows 11 at the moment.

Megahertz · 10 Mar 2024

As Samuria wrote, you probably cloned a Legacy-MBR into a NVMe that is set to boot as UEFI-GPT. It is a quite easy fix.

Install the NVMe back to the adapter and plug the NVME into the Acer's USB port. Boot the Acer and please post a whole window Disk Manager image of ALL your drives. Don't forget to expand the columns so we can read them. How to Post a Screenshot of Disk Management
If you have a MiniTool or AOMEI Partition use it instead or Windows disk manager.

MikeEEE · 10 Mar 2024

Thank you for your assistance Megahertz! I downloaded AOMEI's Partition and gave it a try. Unfortunately I cannot seem to upload to this site even after turning off Enhanced Uploading (I tried both on and off). Here is what I see:

https://i.imgur.com/OaL1WbZ.png

So it looks like the source C: drive has a partition marked as boot but the cloned NVMe does not. I made sure I cloned everything so this is surprising to me. I see that Partition has a clone maybe I'll try that and see how it does.

- - - Updated - - -

Ah, looks like it did upload it didn't show in the post, however. Baby steps!

Samuria · 10 Mar 2024

If you want to stay with 10 the only option is to do a clean install on the new pc as it will be set to uefi and secure boot its quicker to get it running trying to clone can be more pain. As it is disk 0 shows 579 meg partition as active and disk 1 shows second partition as active but if its st to uefi its not going to work

Megahertz · 10 Mar 2024

This are the steps you should do.
- Disable the recovery partition on the Acer drive
- Clean the NVMe and convert it to GPT
- Create the EFI and the MSR partition
- Clone and enlarge to 1G the Recovery partition from the Acer to the NVMe
- Clone the C: partition from the Acer to the NVMe
- Install the boot manager on created the EFI partition
- Enable the Recovery partition on the NVMe and on the Acer drive

On the Acer, open a CMD window as administrator and type:
reagentc /disable
diskpart
list disk (it will list all drives. Identify the NVMe drive number)
select disk n (replace n by the NVMe drive number obtained with list disk)
clean
convert gpt
select part 1
del part override
create part EFI size=100
format fs=FAT32 quick
assign letter=S
create part MSR size=16
Exit (to exit disk part)

You should have now a 100M EFI partition and a 16M MSR partition

With the Macrium Reflect drag and drop the Recovery partition from the Acer drive to the NVMe drive, sending it to the right end of the NVMe drive. Enlarge it to 1G.
With the Macrium Reflect drag and drop the C: (windows) partition from the Acer drive to the NVMe drive between the MSR and the Recovery partition. Adjust the size to take all space.

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
bcdboot X:\Windows /s S: /f UEFI (change X with the Windows partition letter assigned to the Windows partition on the NVMe )
diskpart
select vol S
remove letter=S
exit

Reagentc /enable (to enable the recovery environment on the Acer to the Recovery partition)

Shut down and Install the NVMe on the HP computer. It should boot using the Windows from Acer. Let it update and install the drivers.

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
Reagentc /enable (to enable the recovery environment on the HP computer to the Recovery partition)

MikeEEE · 10 Mar 2024

Thank you for your reply Samuria. It sounds like you are saying it's not possible, but Megahertz is saying it's an easy fix. Pardon me for being confused. :)

Is there no way to simply copy all settings and applications to a newly installed Windows 10 installation?

- - - Updated - - -

Wow I just saw your post Megahertz and that looks like a winner! I will see how that treats me. Thank you!

- - - Updated - - -

My day is drawing to a close here Megahertz so I will have to attend to this tomorrow. I do have a question:

> With the Macrium Reflect drag and drop the Recovery partition from the Acer drive to the NVMe drive

Which partition exactly is this? The Disk 0: 579MB partition or the Disk 0: 606MB partition?

Volume Z · 10 Mar 2024

MikeEEE said:

So it looks like the source C: drive has a partition marked as boot but the cloned NVMe does not. I made sure I cloned everything so this is surprising to me.

It does not mean anything. You'll never see two partitions tagged "Boot" in those partitioning tools as it marks the live operating system. There can't be two of them.

Megahertz · 10 Mar 2024

MikeEEE said:

My day is drawing to a close here Megahertz so I will have to attend to this tomorrow. I do have a question:

> With the Macrium Reflect drag and drop the Recovery partition from the Acer drive to the NVMe drive

Which partition exactly is this? The Disk 0: 579MB partition or the Disk 0: 606MB partition?

The recovery partition is the last partition (606M)

The NVMe partition should end with the following sequence.