start menu doesn't work on OS cloned with Aomei

I am trying to clone a 760GB Western Digital HDD to a Sandisk Ultra 500GB SSD using Aomei Backer Upper. I use the disk clone option, not the OS option. The original drive had 40% free and the clone went smoothly leaving 10% free on the SSD. I can boot into Windows 10 ok and it seems to work except that left clicking on the start menu doesn't work. Right clicking on the startmenue works as normal. I tried removing the original HDD before booting from the new disc and I also tried keeping the original disc in place and using BIOS to boot from the SSD. The original installation works fine with a trouble free start menu.

Before cloning I disabled hibernation, restore, and moved the pagefile to another disc. I thought the page file might have been the problem as the other disc got relabelled. However, I repeated the whole cloning process with the page file moved back to C: and got exactly the same results.

If anyone thinks they can look into this, let me know what info you need and I will post back. Thanks.

Here's some more information:

From Drive Manager after booting from original drive (ignoring irrelevant drives):

Disc 1 (the SSD)
E: 465GB NTFS F: 975MB NTFS
Healthy (Active, Primary Partition) Healthy (Primary Partition)

Disc 3 (the original WD drive)

C: 698GB NTFS [no letter] 464MB
Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Healthy (Recovery Partition)
Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

After booting from the new drive:

Disc 1
C: 465GB NTFS F: 975MB NTFS
Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Healthy (Primary Partition)
Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

Disc 3

E: 698GB NTFS [no letter] 464MB
Healthy (Active, Primary Partition) Healthy (Recovery Partition)

Welcome to the forum. It look like you didn't clone the disk only the partition you need to clone the whole disk with system reserved and recovery

Thanks for the suggestion. I will have another go but I think Aomei only gives a single option. You select the source drive and it's supposed to clone it all. That suggests maybe I should try some different cloning software.

You can't technically "clone" a 760GB drive to a 500GB drive -- because "cloning" means making an EXACT copy, and you can't do that when the target drive is smaller than the source drive.

So, the partition sizes are getting SHRUNK in the process -- and maybe that resizing operation is hosing up the boot!

My suggestion is to do the following:
1) Remove stuff and shrink down the largest partition on the large disk until the sum of all the partitions is 10% less than 500GB.
2) Use Macrium Reflect to then "clone" the large disk onto the small disk. Since the partitions are already small enough to all fit, there will be no resizing in the process.

The details are as follows:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB-to-Hard-Drive drive adapter (like the one illustrated below)
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/dis...Cloning+a+disk
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.

Good Luck

Mark Phelps said:

You can't technically "clone" a 760GB drive to a 500GB drive -- because "cloning" means making an EXACT copy, and you can't do that when the target drive is smaller than the source drive.

So, the partition sizes are getting SHRUNK in the process -- and maybe that resizing operation is hosing up the boot!

My suggestion is to do the following:
1) Remove stuff and shrink down the largest partition on the large disk until the sum of all the partitions is 10% less than 500GB.
2) Use Macrium Reflect to then "clone" the large disk onto the small disk. Since the partitions are already small enough to all fit, there will be no resizing in the process.

The details are as follows:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB-to-Hard-Drive drive adapter (like the one illustrated below)
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/dis...Cloning+a+disk
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.

Good Luck

Thanks for this detailed suggestion. I reduced the space used on the source drive but Windows won't let me shrink the partition because of "immovable files". This is apparently a common problem to which the solution is to remove hiberfil.sys, pagefile, and restore. I did those things and Windows still won't let me shrink the partition.

Word Man said:

1) You can use Macrium to clone and resize the C: partition on the fly, i.e., in the process of setting up the clone operation you can have Macrium shrink the C: partition so all of the partitions on source disk will fit on the destination disk. See more here: https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/di...Cloning+a+disk (Note Step 4 in particular) I've done this myself and no hosing occurred.

Thanks. I did this and it worked exactly as suggested. Problem solved.

Mark Phelps said:

You can't technically "clone" a 760GB drive to a 500GB drive -- because "cloning" means making an EXACT copy, and you can't do that when the target drive is smaller than the source drive.

So, the partition sizes are getting SHRUNK in the process -- and maybe that resizing operation is hosing up the boot!

My suggestion is to do the following:
1) Remove stuff and shrink down the largest partition on the large disk until the sum of all the partitions is 10% less than 500GB.
2) Use Macrium Reflect to then "clone" the large disk onto the small disk. Since the partitions are already small enough to all fit, there will be no resizing in the process.

The details are as follows:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB-to-Hard-Drive drive adapter (like the one illustrated below)
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/dis...Cloning+a+disk
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.

Good Luck

Thanks also to Mark

I spoke too soon. The cloning with Macrium produces identical looking partitions for the original and the new drive, but the system has reverted to not responding to left click on start. It must be something to do with the cloning because the original installation has no such problem, but I can't see what can be wrong with the cloning. Again I have tested it with the original drive in place and with it disconnected.