Windows 10: Cloned drive will not boot

I'm sorry....the Acer logo

I am going to try Kyhi's suggestions now...finally an evening to get back to this!

 

Here's what my command prompt looks like, after booting from Windows 10 USB boot

 

A few questions....

There's my volumes

You advised..

Or use diskpart and assign a drive letter "S" to the Fat32 System (EFI) partition
the run> bcdboot C:\windows /s S:

There's only one hard drive (well, m.2 SSD) installed in the laptop

 

While still in Diskpart, run:
select volume 2
assign letter=S
exit

then run
bcdboot C:\windows /s S:

 

I'll try that now....gotta go into CMOS and set USB drive to first (boot order) so I can get in!

 

Ok well I got this....






In my bios/cmos/whatever.... what should the boot order be?

Right now I have USB thumbdrive
Windows boot manager
Samsung m.2 EVO 950
etc etc

 

Windows Boot Manager first.

 

Yeah...when I do that, it never makes it to the USB boot drive

 

What error does it give you?

 

I assume #3 the USB HDD is your Verbatim store and go USB stick ???
Also error message is not Boot File related... The OS appears to be the culprit

usually pressing F12 when the OEM logo appears may bring up the boot menu options,,

 

Assuming the clone was performed correctly, the initial problem seemed to be the changed disk sig. That could have been sorted with the litlle program I posted.

Not clear what the op has done to it since the disk sig change. Might be other issues now.

( On a related note, creating decent 15063 pe is proving tricky. I haven't got there yet)

 

Yes, the USB 3 is the Windows 10 boot drive (USB) I made per your guidance

That program you posted...what should be the next step(s)?

 

Not sure what you have done since the initial disk sig change.

If that was the only problem:

Fix the drive letter.




Fix the boot menu.





Where it says select Active part, it means the system part on efi.

 

in Fix os letter, you select the Windows drive that isn't booting.

In boot fix, you select the Windows drive that isn't booting.
You also select the system drive.

 

Wow.

Really...wow.

So I set each to C: since that's the only drive I have *Smile

I restarted and went into the Windows setup hit upgrade and it gave me that compatibility report. There's no clean way to get out of that (it tells you to remove the boot media). So I go kicked back to the Windows setup screen, where you have the 'Repair' option in the lower left. I selected Power Off the PC and removed the USB. After a deep pause...I booted the laptop. It's immediately booted to my Windows 10 log in!

So, it's back! And with that m.2 SSD it booted in 4 seconds!

Big thank you to everyone involved.