Windows 10: Cloned windows 10 HDD wont boot on new material

Hey helpers !

Here is my issue that starting to get to me.
I have upgraded my setup, changing my case, pcu, gpu, motherboards and RAM.

My plan was to clone my windows 10 SSD sata to my new M.2. The problem was that my old motherboard did have a M.2 slot. So i have cloned my SSD to a HDD 2.5" sata in hope to get it to boot on my new pc to clone it on the M.2.

Well... it didnt worked. My MSI Z490 gaming edge wifi motherboard doesnt seem to think it is a bootable drive. My new pc is always booting on BIOS, not even allowing me to put it in the boot order chain. The bios does recognize its a HDD but seems to think its a data HDD.

Ive tried to boot the HDD on my old pc and suprise, it worked perfectly well...

What am i missing here ?

I have tried different strategies I've found around the web but none worked. I insist on doing this instead of a fresh install cause I have an app installed that allows me to do remote work and access secured work database from home.. thats the only reason really. They cant reinstall it.. its COVID and the TI are not allowed to go at employees places... I know..

Sorry for this long post. Trying to be specific.
Thanks a lot for your help.

:)

 

Cloned HDD wont boot

I cloned a HDD to get rid of older HDD and lose the IDE cables and stick with SATA. Only problem is the cloned HDD wont boot nor repair, and the boot record seems to be on the second IDE drive and not the one with the windows partition on it. Is there anyway to fix this situation??? I'm afraid of the older drives failing on me, and would like to keep all the installed programs intact. Any ideas on how to make this work???

 

Cloned HDD wont boot

Background: Two partitions on HDD. Bought a new HDD and this is what happened...

Program I use is Easeus disk copy. It has 2 modes to clone data. Clone disk and clone partition. Whenever I tried the option that only copied the primary/windows partition, I got an error at boot. When I did the whole HDD copy, everything worked like a charm.

No, I had no important windows files in that second partition. It only had my important files.

 

Cloned HDD wont boot

Okay two things you need to do.

First of all depending on your cloning software you should disable pagefile and hibernation file before attempting to clone, these two files are very large, and more importantly take longer than normal files to copy as they are seen as contiguous. (Same thing goes with other large files like ISOs and video files).

Secondly, the Best thing to do is set sata to AHCI or RAID (google it). then clone windows 7 to the new HDD, you can then force initialization of the IDE drivE (it wont other wise cuz it will share an ID conflict) copy "backup files" over after installing new software. For certain apps you will have to google how to do that, for others you can set an export file or something similar to save you backups.

If worried about your browser? Set a online sync before hand then after install you can disable it if you want other things like game saves are easily copied over. Depends on hte game but they all have a save spot.

The issue is, you are moving from a jmicron IDE controller to a AMD SATA controller. that is why you are not booting and Boot recovery will not work. Even if you installed to SATA drive as a IDE controller, you might still have problems. (You would then still have to deal with changing IDE to AHCI or RAID registry changes and driver installations and it just a mess). You have to preinstall the new drivers to get it to work precloning, then as soo nas clong ing is done. dont restart. power down, and pull the IDE drive. the maybe windows recovery will work with F6 drivers on the USB stick, still probably not.

THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD DO...

It seriously takes less time to make a 7 usb stick with all your 7 drivers (a 4GB will work), reboot change HDD boot priority to USB then new main boot drive, key is to drop the jmicron drive to teh bottom Dont just push teh other drives up drop jmicron then fix the others. Also during install you need to pull the USB drive at first reboot.

New windows install 7-10 minutes. Driver installation 10-15 minutes. App installation, depends.

And here is the kicker.

You can always change you HDD boot priority BACK to the IDE drive and boot it normally. So it is a true Dual OS setup.


EDIT: BTW, if you pre-format a drive in windows 7, you should not get the "windows 7 needs to create another partition". The only reason it is necessary is if you want to run EFS. (It is also possible to remove it afterwards, but not worth the bother IMHO)