cloned hard drive wont boot up

ahuggon · Feb 16, 2015

Hi,

i wanted to upgrade the hard drive on my laptop both to increase capacity and (hopefully) also performance by installing a hybrid drive (and also going from a 500gb to 1TB)

however i don't have the windows install disc (i bought the laptop with it already installed)

i read that cloning would create an exact copy , so I should (in theory) be able to clone the old drive to the new one and then just plug the new drive in and go.

I found that alot of the recomended cloning programs couldn't hack that I was cloning to a bigger drive so i ended up using a piece of software called 'Disc Clone'.

i selected the c drive as my 'souce' and 'E' as me desination - representing the new drive plugged into a 'caddy'.

i told it to do the 'full' clone (as opposed to the fast one). and left it running for many hours - after which it claimed it had cloned correctly.

i then switched the laptop off and replaced the old disc with the new one.

When i fired it up again, i just got a blinking cursor.

i tried putting the recovery disc i had created in, and on the recovery page where it lists the OS's installed it didn't have anything listed.

i then went tot he command prompt of the recovery console and tried

bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /fixmbr

alas, I still can't seem to boot machine form the new disc.

i think there is a slight complication, in that I think there were two partition in the original - a small one that seemed to be some sort of recovery/system area and the main one (the latter actually having windows on)

I thought I had cloned both. ( the disc clone display had a 'tree' display with the drive, then the two partitions and I clicked at the highest level).

can anyone suggest what I am doing wrong, or what I can try.

many thanks,

Andy

ahnilated · Feb 16, 2015

Use Clonezilla and it will ask you to copy all the partitions. You do this from the Clonezilla boot disk, you don't do it within Windows.

faalin · Feb 16, 2015

go over to this webpage and download Macrium reflect http://www.maximumpc.com/how_clone_hard_drive_or_ssd_2014

I just ran into this two weeks ago when changing from a 120gb ssd to a 240gb ssd. Forgot to grab the 26mb partition with the boot manager on it and the drive wouldn't boot. just did a re-clone and made sure to get the partition and everything was fine.

ArtPog · Feb 16, 2015

It's really hard (if not impossible) to tell what went awry when you attempted to clone your source HDD with that Disc Clone program. There are more than a score of these disk-cloning programs out there although I've never come across that particular program. I assume it's a freebie, yes?

Anyway, you might want to try this disk-cloning program - http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
Actually the disk-cloning program I use is the Casper 8 program - http://www.fssdev.com since I'm primarily interested in utilizing this type of program as a comprehensive backup system for routine & frequent backups of my boot drive. It's extraordinary fast when used that way. However, the program is a commercial one ($49.99) and I infer from your query that you're interested in a freebie to be used in a one-shot disk-cloning operation.

I've used that Macrium Reflect program a number of times and it seems to do the job in which you're interested. We're assuming that your source HDD boots without incident and is completely functional, right? I take it you've installed your destination disk, the 1TB hybrid drive, in a USB external HDD enclosure during the disk-cloning operation, yes? That's what you mean when you refer to a "caddy", right?

ahuggon · Feb 16, 2015

faalin :

hi... macurium reflect was one of the products i tried that complained that the disc sizes were different - said 'cannot clone , sector sizes different' or words to that effect

USAFRet · Feb 16, 2015

however i don't have the windows install disc (i bought the laptop with it already installed)

Easily fixable from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-recovery

faalin · Feb 16, 2015

ahuggon :

that's odd because that's what I used to change ssd in the computer. It could be that I plugged both 120 and 240 SSD into my desktop and cloned them that way, I did not use the computer the disc belong to.

ahuggon · Feb 16, 2015

ahnilated :

ArtPog :

yes... i do mean an external usb disk enclosure.

i was also using the free version of mancurian - so maybe that's why I couldn't go from 500gb to 1TB

faalin · Feb 16, 2015

ahuggon :

ahnilated :

ArtPog :

yes... i do mean an external usb disk enclosure.

i was also using the free version of mancurian - so maybe that's why I couldn't go from 500gb to 1TB

That wouldn't be the issue because I use the free 30 trial for mine. If I do remember right it split the 240gb drive in two. Once I booted into windows I just told windows to merge the c drive with the unallocated portion of the drive. After that I was a full 240gb drive.

ahuggon · Feb 18, 2015

thanks guys for all the answers......

having looked at the help that came with macrium reflect, I realised it said that the sector size error i was getting was usually due to the caddy enforcing a sector size of 4086 - something about not correctly implementing 'advanced formating 512e'

looks like i need a caddy that doesn't do this?

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