Can't boot of off my cloned hard drive.

BiteSized

Reputable
Jul 28, 2014
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4,510
I'm in a bit of a jiffy. I recently bought a caviar black 1tb hard drive and wanted it to replace my caviar blue so I could use the blue for extra storage. What I did was I cloned the blue disk to the black disk so they were now exactly the same. Then, I booted off of the black one and it seemed fine. Now what I faced was that all of my program's would not work on the black one until it was drive C. But you cannot change the drive letter of c (my blue one) inside of windows. So I install DBAN's Boot and Nuke on a usb and used it to clear the blue hard drive. Afterwards I tried to boot of off my black drive but it wasn't working. I can only get into my bios and if I attempt to boot off of it, I get a black screen for about 5 seconds while it is trying to load, then it takes me back to my bios. Please Help!
 
Solution
You may have been deceived by the words the BIOS uses. In the area where you specify the Boot Priority Sequence, the prompts label the HDD units in terms of how we recognize them: WD XXXX1234 1TB, WD YYY6699 2TB, etc. BUT when you select the boot drive, what it actually does is remember the MOBO PORT that drive is attached to. The result can be that you think it is set properly, and it is not.

So, how to fix? Two steps, similar to what makkem says.
1. Disconnect power, open case, disconnect both HDD units. Reconnect power and boot immediately into BIOS Setup. Go to Boot Priority Sequence and set it to boot from your optical drive, and nothing else. SAVE and EXIT, and it will probably fail since I doubt you have a bootable CD in that...

makkem

Distinguished
Hi
Have you tried removing both hard drives,start computer and check that no hard drives show in BIOS.
Turn off computer and install only the black drive,turn on computer and check that it is c drive if it is everything should work ok.
You can then install blue drive for extra storage.
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
You may have been deceived by the words the BIOS uses. In the area where you specify the Boot Priority Sequence, the prompts label the HDD units in terms of how we recognize them: WD XXXX1234 1TB, WD YYY6699 2TB, etc. BUT when you select the boot drive, what it actually does is remember the MOBO PORT that drive is attached to. The result can be that you think it is set properly, and it is not.

So, how to fix? Two steps, similar to what makkem says.
1. Disconnect power, open case, disconnect both HDD units. Reconnect power and boot immediately into BIOS Setup. Go to Boot Priority Sequence and set it to boot from your optical drive, and nothing else. SAVE and EXIT, and it will probably fail since I doubt you have a bootable CD in that drive. OK, shut down and disconnect power. Now it only knows one possible boot device.
2. Reconnect the two HDD's to mobo ports. I suggest you connect the new Black unit to the first SATA port, but not completely necessary. Close up the case, reconnect power, boot into BIOS Setup again. Go to Boot Priority Sequence and set it the way you want. Most would set to try the optical drive first, then the new black HDD that has you OS on it, and NO mention of the old Blue HDD in thee boot sequence. SAVE and EXIT again, and it should boot cleanly. Now it has a revised boot sequence with 2 valid devices.

By the way, no matter what you do, the HDD that you just booted from is always the C: drive - you can't change that. Other drives will be assigned other letters by Windows, and you can change those if you need to in Disk Management.
 
Solution