New
#1
Windows 10 - Clone to SSD Will Not Boot
I have a Dell Latitude E6520 with a Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS HDD, i7 CPU, Nvidia NVS4200M dedicated graphics, and 16 Gigs RAM. It has run Windows 7, 64 bit for several years like a champ.
I got the auto update to Windows 10 which originally had a 'flashing screen' issue that I eventually resolved by disabling the NVIDIA driver from Device Manager, then re-enabling it and then reinstalling the driver. The laptop has run fine on Windows 10 for a couple of weeks so I decided to upgrade to an SSD and bought a Crucial MX200 500 Gig SSD drive along with an eSATA cable that pugged in the eSATA port on the laptop with the other end connected to the new SSD which was recognized and visible in Disk Manager.
Crucial supply a link to a free version of Acronis True Image HD which I downloaded but when I tried to clone the old drive to the new, it kept stopping with an error box. I then browsed forums and came up with the idea of using EaseUS Todo which I downloaded and tried. The EaseUS software went through the clone process and gave a success message but when I powered down, and put the SSD into the drive bay in place of the old HDD, it would not boot. The BIOS could 'see' the SSD as it gave the name etc. but the error of no boot device found kept reoccurring. The other issue I then had was that, on booting the HDD, I'd get an odd pale blue screen asking me to chose between booting to Windows 10 or EaseUS Linux!
I called Crucial support and they talked me through creating an Acronis bootable USB drive, using it to clone the HDD to the SSD, but I still got the error message. They then had me run Acronis in Windows 7 compatibility mode which was then able to clone the drive with a success message but the result was the same, the SSD 'clone' was not seen as bootable by the BIOS. I've attached a screen capture of Disk Manager when you can see my original HDD as C: and the SSD as D: The clone always give me the copied files but not the system or boot options.
When all this failed the Crucial support guy (Ben) recommended I try Macrium so I did. Macrium appeared to work by cloning the drive with a success message but again, inserting the SSD gets the 'no boot device' found message in the BIOS. The BIOS is set to boot in 'legacy' mode and it 'sees' the SSD - there's also a 'UFEI' mode but, when I select that, there are no boot devices seen.
I can see and browse all the files, even the system files, on the new SSD but Disk Manager doesn't show the words 'System' or 'Boot' against it. I search last night for ways to make a disk into a system disk and thought I'd found the solution in sevenforums by:
Copying bootmgr from C: to D: which I was able to do and then
Issuing the command bcdedit /export D:\$Windows.~BT\boot\bcd at an elevated command prompt but that ended up with an 'access denied' message.
I'm REALLY frustrated at this point, it's Saturday and I've been at this since Wednesday! I am considering trying to do a clean install of Windows 10 to the SSD and then reinstalling all apps and getting my files back from the old HDD. However, I am worried that the Windows 7 license key won't work for the Windows 10 upgrade.
Can anyone help? PLEASE!