Changing Drive Letter and Booting After Cloning

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DesertDryDock

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Apr 23, 2013
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I cloned my old 2tb HDD to a new 4tb SSHD using Macrium Reflect. I wanted to save the data on my old drive because things have a way of going south on me during operations like this because I usually don't have a clue as to what I'm doing. During the cloning process the drive letter on my new drive and my new system reserve were changed to the next letters in line (E&G). The system boots back to my old 2tb drive just fine but I can't seem to get it to bring up what I need to boot into the new SSHD (Please refer to my earlier statement "I usually don't have a clue as to what I'm doing")

I have an ASUS P9X79 motherboard and I can't get past its "EZ BIOS" when booting. I want to get to the basic boot menu because I think the last post in this thread http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/270118-32-clone-boot-disk-wrong-drive-letter-change-drive-lette has my answer but I'm posting this to hear your best solutions...

Thanks for reading & any help is appreciated.
 
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DesertDryDock

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Thanks i7Baby but I can't get past the ASUS EZ BIOS on boot up, nothing seems to work in the EZ BIOS, I find the new drive in the boot priority menu and click on it then the system immediately boots to Windows, back to my old install.

Will it work okay to just unplug my old drive sata cable and put in the Windows 7 installation disk like I was going to reinstall but instead go to the recovery console, type "fixmbr" and go through the process?
 
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DesertDryDock

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Okay I just got into the Boot Manager (F1 key on boot) and the only option I had wast a boot to Windows 7, no drive options. So in the ASUS Easy BIOS I noticed that there is no icon for my new drive on the first page, just a P6:ATAPI with a lock icon over it and a drive icon with the old 2tb HDD model number under it.
 
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DesertDryDock

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Oddly enough it looks like I've been booting to the new drive since yesterday. I had changed the drive priority in the ASUS boot manager but didn't think it took because everything looked the same "well its a clone you idiot!" This morning I decided to fly some carrier traps in my flight sim and when it started loading it said I had a bunch of missing scenery files from the "G" drive, so it isn't running on my original C drive or the files would be there. I checked my ASUS EZ BIOS and sure enough the new drive has replaced my old drive. So I disconnected m old drive and it would not boot and is said

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem.
1: Insert your Windows installation disk and restart your computer.
2:Choose your language settings then click next.
3:Click repair your computer.
If you do not have the installation disk bla bla bla
Status: 0xc000000e
Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

So I plugged in my old drive and it booted right up. In the "My Computer" explorer window the C drive has the little windows icon attached to the drive and my new drive doesn't have it. So is my old C drive acting as the boot device for my new drive or is it somehow bypassing the boot priority and just booting me back to my old C drive? I'm confused...

 
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i7Baby

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If you cloned the c: drive, that would create problems. Cloning doesn't often work very well. The only cloning software that seems to consistently work is that which comes with Samsung SSDs. But once that's done, you wipe the original disk.

If you want to change OS drives, I suggest you install Windows on the new drive. Rather than using cloning software.
 
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DesertDryDock

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Thanks i7Baby, Yea its a Seagate drive and the old drive is a Seagate also. The Seagate Disk Wizard will not install on my PC, it just comes up a black screen with a back button. When I hit the back button a window pops up saying I need to have Seagate or Samsung drives installed on my PC for it to install the wizard. Did I mention I also have a Samsung drive installed? I called the Seagate tech service and they told me I'm the only person on planet earth to have the install problem and offered no solution.

The thing is, I have some seriously tweeked flight sim software that took many months to get to the sweet spot that I have. Reloading Windows is nothing. Reloading all the sim software and getting it meld with my CAD software is huge...

Nothing comes easy! I've got to find a way to do this.
 
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DesertDryDock

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Yea! I'm out of time off, but I'll start over next Friday if my heart's still beating;)

 
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firstcompsvc

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It won't matter what type of drive it is SSD or mechanical I have tried both types when cloning and on 2 different Asus motherboards the drives boot to a J.
The only fix I found was boot to command prompt and use diskpart. The letters are usually swapped system reserve is c and main is d. You have to swap them back.
diskpart - to see the drives
list volume - to see and chose the partitions
select volume - to make changes to that particular partition
remove letter=C to remove the wrong letter C from "system reserved" partition 99-100MB
assign letter=k or whatever is available, then select volume for main partition
remove letter=d or whatever letter the main partition is (usually the largest partition)
assign letter=C
list volumes to double check that it is now correct
exit stay in command prompt and perform the following commands
enter cd C:\windows\system32 hit enter
bootrec /fixmbr hit enter
bootrec /rebuildbcd hit enter
exit
boot to windows
 
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