Windows 10: Cloned Boot Drive won't boot

Update: Whilst typing up all that I’d done so far, I managed to solve it, but posting anyway in case of help to others.

Apologies in advance for being a newbie and the probably obvious mistakes made here.

I had a Windows 10 Pro install on a 128GB SSD. It was full so I cloned it to a 256GB SSD using EaseUS. I think I did all the partitions (screenshots below) – though they appear in what looks like the wrong order. I then changed the boot order in BIOS to boot from the 256GB and it booted fine. After a few days of all working fine I cleaned the 128GB with diskpart and reformatted. On next boot, I got a blue screen saying “Recovery Your PC/Device needs to be repaired. A required device isn’t connected or can’t be accessed” with error “0xc000000e”. The 256GB drive does show up in BIOS as a Windows Boot Manger option.

I do have both the install OEM dvd and a bootable recovery USB drive I made before cloning. Troubleshoot>Advanced>Start-up Repair fails. System Resore and System Image Recovery both give errors.

Some googling (this is from a forum I suspect is not as good as this one!) suggested I should have marked the 100MB "System Reserved" partition on the larger disk 2 as "Active" in disk management. And maybe fix the bootloader with bcdboot. But now it seems too late to achieve that, or is it?

The USB Recovery offers me recover from a drive>Just remove my files which I could do, but wanted to check in here first.

(I also disabled Secure boot at one stage thinking that was stopping my boot from my USB drive, which I gather was a mistake so I better put that back How to Disable or Enable Secure Boot for ASUS Motherboard)

I did download the Bootable recovery disk from Kyhi, but got stuck at the point where it says replace the boot.wim with his, as on my drive I only have Reconstruct.WIM and Reconstruct.WIM2

Next I did a fresh install of Win10Pro on the 128GB drive so I could boot up properly and take a look in Disk Management and Diskpart. See screen shots below.


















As I was typing this up I remember that I had tried bootrec, but only two commands and then I found a website with four commands to run: Fix the MBR – Guide for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and that actually worked! The drive now boots. It gave an error on start about page files – and I think I had set that 256GB drive to have no page file on it. So perhaps that was part of the problem. I set it to have a system managed page file.

Disk Management now:





Though I have solved my main problem I thought I’d post this anyway in case others have a similar problem and in case there’s anything wrong – ie. is it fine that the little 94MB partition isn’t at the beginning and is it fine that the boot drive is now Disk 1 when it was Disk 0 before?

:)

 

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