Can't clone Win10 drive, C: clone won't boot

TomHBP

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Jan 18, 2016
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Hello,
I'm a long-time lurker, first time poster!

I'm trying disgnosis for my Dad, who's trying to move over to SSD.

The story so far:
Using AOMEI backupper bootable disk, we tried to clone his current HDD onto the SSD. Part-way through the clone process, it gives an error saying that the drive is too fragmented to clone, and stops.

We run defrag on the C: Drive, resulting in a 1% fragmented drive at the end, and try again.

The same message crops up - too fragmented. It turns out the 'recovery' partition (It's an OEM machine, so its ~10Gb rather than the normal 100Mb) is too fragmented to clone, and we can't defrag it.

So we just clone the C: drive, leaving 1Gb of unallocated space, and then use the recovery DVD's to run startup repair, hoping it will restore the MBR or 'normal' recovery partition, and make the system load.
All we get is a blue screen with a blinking cursor in the top left that persists or over 5 minutes.

Startup Repair completes successfully. According to the Log file it ran 2 iterations of the repair operations, and found no errors!
However the drive still will not boot.

This is particuarly annoying as I have used backupper both personally and professionally and have NEVER seen the fragmentation issue before, or had any issue at all for that matter with a cloned drive.

Help / bursts of genius are greatly appreciated!

Kind regards,
Tom.
 

TomHBP

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Jan 18, 2016
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Hi Mike,

Thanks for your response. Does it matter that my Dad's PC uses regular BIOS rather than UEFI? Or does Win10 have its own UEFI?
Conversely I used exactly the same process on my Win10 system (which does have UEFI) amd it worked flawlessly.

Either way I will get my dad to try Macrium and report back.
 

TomHBP

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Jan 18, 2016
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This worked perfectly - Macrium Reflect sorted the problem and now the system boots perfectly.

Thanks! :)
 

You're welcome MR saved my a** few times. I always have a fresh backup of whole system SSD made at least once monthly or just before a major update to W10 insider version.