I have recently built my daughter a mini itx pc and used an old hdd but its too slow so I have cloned it onto a small ssd but its not recognising the ssd as a bootable drive. Is it because its an exact clone of the hdd so the boot manager is looking for the hdd? Do I just need to repair the install using the windows disc?
EaseUS todo backup. Have used it numerous times with win 7 and the only problem I have ever had was when cloning to a different size drive I had to clone each partition then repair using the windows disc. I tried to repair the win 8.1 cloned ssd with the windows disk and it's having none of it and is even telling me the SSD is locked now It's a crappy V4 from crucial which I wish I had never bought, it works fine as a backup drive in a usb caddy though.
That's a common problem with most cloning programmes, I always use Acronis I'm not sure I think clonezilla will clone to a smaller drive ok
it might be uefi problem, if the machine uses uefi instead or normal bios, I had a similar issue when I installed win7 using uefi installer, I was building 2 identical machines, and thought, great, install oem on one clone drive, job done, but nope didn't like it. a quick google found this and this
It's definitely UEFI. That's a useful link to fixing it only problem is will it unlock the ssd at the same time I wonder?
I have had issues cloning Windows 8. I have found Samsung Data Migrate very reliable, the program is free but this works only if you are cloning to a Samsung disk. I have tried to clone Windows 8 with easeus and acronis but it would not boot, I now think this may have been resolved if I had made a bootable system recovery disk before doing the clone, then cloned the disk, and if boot failed run the system recovery disk to correct the new cloned drive but I have never tried this. Several sources on the net say this often fixes a cloned drive so it boots, make sure you are doing a proper clone and not just copying partitions. I used Macrium Reflect Free to clone a os drive the other day and was happy with it, I think this also has an option to make the bootable recovery disk.
In addition to uEFI, you have to worry about whether the board's got SecureBoot enabled or not. If it has, the installation's unclonable for all intents and purposes. And I think GPT partitioning interacts with all this in some new ways? I snappily refer to this whole multifaceted mess as the uEFI-GPT-SecureBoot problem. The only way I found to reliably do this was using Windows PE's built-in imaging tools (diskpart, etc.) to capture the partition, manually repartition the destination drive as a bootable drive and then apply the image - it bypasses the bootable uEFI-GPT-SecureBoot problems (which I don't understand) entirely, though you can't have SecureBoot enabled at the finish. I wrote it all down at the time for fear I wouldn't be able to remember how it was done, which is just as well, because I can't. I have the detailed instructions for that method and can write up/post them if you'd like to give it a go (it works, but is laborious and you need a bootable WinPE and to be comfortable using diskpart). I found it quite straightforward once I taught myself how to use diskpart. Oh, and it's only easy if you've got a single partition on the drive, multiple partitions make it much more annoying to do this way. There are posts in forums indicating that the latest premium version of Paragon might be able to do it, too, but I'm skeptical that even that could do it with SecureBoot enabled - the whole point of SecureBoot is that it makes this kind of drive-to-drive stuff impossible.
Well I tried to use Macrium Reflect Free and it seems to have knackered the SSD. It's now reporting to only be 2gb in size in disk management. Gonna try some tools to see if I can fix it. It's a crucial V4 and has been an absolute POS right from the start. I intended to upgrade my sons 128gb C300 SSD to a 256gb MX100 at some point and use the 128gb for this mini pc, I think I'm going to bring this forward and then just do a normal reinstall. I was only trying to clone because my daughter plays league of legends and downloading it all takes literally half a day on our shite speed broadband.
Yikes, sorry to hear that. The complete lack of user friendly tools bundled with Crucial products (which are quick and dirt cheap to be fair) is annoying. I have a 512GB M4 that was not playing right with a Sata 2 connection in my old Alienware laptop, it would just bork the drive every so often. Crucial sent me instructions that to do a 'full erase' in Windows 7 which would reset it, I then swapped my drive to a desktop with sata 3 and it is working faultlessly now and since. If you want to try this is what they told me:
Also, in disk management does it show a 2gb partition and the rest as unpartitioned free space, because this is easier to correct by increasing the partition size?
nope the 2gb (actually I made a mistake it's only 2mb) is the only partition. I'm now locked in a battle with crucial who have offered me only basically a tenner for a drive that I paid £37 11 months ago and has never worked properly saying it's fair market value, surely I'm owed about two thirds of the cost as feasibly it's not even reached a year of use.
Diskpart didn't work. Still showing as only 1mb now and I have to initialize it evreytime for it to even be seen I think the POS has finally died completely. I might fire an email to Macrium Reflect Free as it happened while using their software but that may of just been coincidental.
It's in warranty and it's gone wrong (as countless V4 drives have). You're entitled to a full refund, and **** them with a rake if they say otherwise.
If diskpart is listing the drive as 2mb then i would say the drive is boned , not sure it's worth using a Linux live CD to confirm what diskpart is reporting.
Give the secure erase routine in Partedmagic a whirl, it's rescued drives for me where others have failed. I highly recommend this utility to acquire it as well.
If you have a Seagate or Maxtor drive you could try the Seagate disk wizard there's a few tools in that it's free from Seagate's site you have to have a Seagate / Maxtor drive connected to the system for it to work, you don't have to clone to or from it the program just needs to detect the drive on the system nothing more
