Drive isn't showing up as bootable after disk clone

R

Rev. Night

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I have 2 nvme drives, one is the original 512gb that my OS Windows 10 is on. The other is my brand new SD850x 2 TB. I want to clone/os migrate everything that is on my smaller, older 512gb drive to the new SD850x bc its bigger and faster. I then will format the 512gb and use it for game storage until pci5 drives are out.

I read around and DiskGenius said I could use their software to do this. Specifically that a disk clone of an OS drive will still be bootable. I go into DiskGenius and select Clone Disc, and I ignore the prompt that comes up that says OS Migration will be better. I hit submit and it does its thing.

When I come back, I see that the SD850x is a perfect clone of the 512gb. I opened up both side by side, they appear to have all the same files. Perfect. I restart and go into bios, thinking that I would have 2 drives available to boot from. Nope! All I see is the original drive. I go into the Advanced Mode view, go into Boot tab, and again, I only see one boot option (512gb drive).

Did I not do something right? Was I led astray by DiskGenius claims? Can a disk clone of an OS drive be bootable?

Mobo is Asus tuf gaming x670e plus wifi, v8090 bios

edit: I also have fast boot on, secure boot off, and CSM on. Without CSM on (and storage set to UEFI), bios won't show any drives as bootable
 
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R

Rev. Night

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yeahhhh thats an old trick. Force the boot by removing the old drive. I was going to do that, but dude, when I first bought this mobo I thought having nvme heatsink was awesome. THEY FUCKING DONT COME OFF. Like its a huge pain in the ass to take off this heat sink due to the thermal putty or whatever asus uses.

I'm terrified of using too much strength to break these fragile nvmes. Do I use a heatgun or hairdryer to warm the thermal pad up first? I am using a plastic wedge tool (stuff you use for car door panels).

The aomei is a solid suggestion. ill try that tonight
 
pendragon1

pendragon1

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Rev. Night said:
is that aoemie backupper free?
Click to expand...
there is a free version that doesnt have all the auto-backup features, it's basic disk clone should work though. theres also a certain 'boot cd" that has a full version on it if need be....
 
pendragon1

pendragon1

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Rev. Night said:
yeahhhh thats an old trick. Force the boot by removing the old drive. I was going to do that, but dude, when I first bought this mobo I thought having nvme heatsink was awesome. THEY FUCKING DONT COME OFF. Like its a huge pain in the ass to take off this heat sink due to the thermal putty or whatever asus uses.

I'm terrified of using too much strength to break these fragile nvmes. Do I use a heatgun or hairdryer to warm the thermal pad up first? I am using a plastic wedge tool (stuff you use for car door panels).

The aomei is a solid suggestion. ill try that tonight
Click to expand...
sit in bios for a few minutes to warm it up and try again. using something thin and plastic should be safe to pop it off.
 
K

Kardonxt

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Rev. Night said:
edit: I also have fast boot on, secure boot off, and CSM on. Without CSM on (and storage set to UEFI), bios won't show any drives as bootable
Click to expand...
This is a bit odd, most systems will only boot to NVME drives when using UEFI. Does your system boot fine to the original drive when you have it set to CSM only?

UEFI is also a bit odd because most systems won't show the boot drive for you to boot from like legacy \ CSM did. You would actually be looking for something like Windows Boot Manager or something along those lines. There's a good chance the system is thrown off by the 2 identical boot drives and physically removing the old drive will resolve your issue.

If you run msinfo32 inside the OS is should list BIOS MODE. I would start there so we aren't just throwing darts at a board.
 
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Rev. Night

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Fascinating. I did msinfo32.exe and I see that the Windows drive is C: (so more proof that I'm on my original drive) but the BIOS Mode is Legacy. How can this be? In Bios, I have storage set to UEFI. If I select Legacy, nothing comes up.

edit: So I just went back into bios. If I select Legacy for storage, my current 512gb drive boots up just fine. It's turning CSM off completely that removes all boot options. Since its getting late and I don't feel like dealing with my pc internals, I'm try a disc clone with aomei and see what happens there. If both programs (disk genius and aomei) fail, I know something else is up

edit 2: aomei fucking sucks. It specifically says disk clones are allowed under the free version, yet when I try it, it refuses. It keeps sending me to the free/pro comparison page with no way to continue the process. Per the website "The Free Standard Edition only supports cloning a data disk."

edit 3: jesus fucking christ easeUS sucks a dick too. They have this fucking website that shows how easy it is to clone a bootable disk. 'Free downloads' written all over it. So i dl it and try it out, nope, it takes me to the Activate Now page. wtf assholes

anyone got freeware suggestions? All I want is clone disk and create a bootable drive. I'll fly the jolly roger flag before I pay for this basic task.
 
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E

Ebernanut

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Rev. Night said:
Fascinating. I did msinfo32.exe and I see that the Windows drive is C: (so more proof that I'm on my original drive) but the BIOS Mode is Legacy. How can this be? In Bios, I have storage set to UEFI. If I select Legacy, nothing comes up.

edit: So I just went back into bios. If I select Legacy for storage, my current 512gb drive boots up just fine. It's turning CSM off completely that removes all boot options. Since its getting late and I don't feel like dealing with my pc internals, I'm try a disc clone with aomei and see what happens there. If both programs (disk genius and aomei) fail, I know something else is up

edit 2: aomei fucking sucks. It specifically says disk clones are allowed under the free version, yet when I try it, it refuses. It keeps sending me to the free/pro comparison page with no way to continue the process. Per the website "The Free Standard Edition only supports cloning a data disk."

edit 3: jesus fucking christ easeUS sucks a dick too. They have this fucking website that shows how easy it is to clone a bootable disk. 'Free downloads' written all over it. So i dl it and try it out, nope, it takes me to the Activate Now page. wtf assholes

anyone got freeware suggestions? All I want is clone disk and create a bootable drive. I'll fly the jolly roger flag before I pay for this basic task.
Click to expand...
I've been using Macrium Reflect free version for several years now and it always works well.

Make sure you're using GPT disk format for UEFI mode to work.
 
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Kardonxt

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Rev. Night said:
Fascinating. I did msinfo32.exe and I see that the Windows drive is C: (so more proof that I'm on my original drive) but the BIOS Mode is Legacy. How can this be? In Bios, I have storage set to UEFI. If I select Legacy, nothing comes up.
Click to expand...
Do you know the model of your current drive? Could it possible be msata or pci-e rather than and NVME drive?

If this is the case there is probably a way to convert it from CSM to UEFI if you are really determined, but frankly you might just be better off backing up any data you need and doing a fresh install.
 
R

Rev. Night

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drive: "WD Black 512GB Performance SSD - 8 Gb/s M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive – WDS512G1X0C"
 
R

Rev. Night

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ok so I didn't know the differences of MBR and GPT still applied to me, but its been a while since I had to deal with harddrives. Disk Genius said that all 3 of my drives were MBR, which is BIOS, not UEFI. Currently I am using Disk Genius to disk clone (again) my old nvme to my new one. I then will use my new drive as a guiney pig and convert it to GPT and see how it appears in bios.

Edit:
Apparently disk genius said that they can convert to gpt but when I try I get an error message about how it needs more sectors at the head and tail end. Why it can't do this for me, I will never understand.

I came across a thread which sounds promising, but I want to run it by you all first. The posts say:

User1:
"Using Macrium Reflect 8, is it as simple as using the cloning operation from the MBR to the GPT drive? Are there other steps to do for completion?"

User2:
"You cannot clone an MBR drive to a GPT drive.

What you can do with Macrium Reflect (and I have done successfully) is to make a system image of the MBR disk, clean install the same version of Windows 10 on the new system in UEFI/GPT mode to create all the partitions required for UEFI, then boot from the Macrium Reflect recovery USB and restore JUST the C: partition from the system image to replace the C: partition created by the clean install. You then need to run 'Fix Windows boot problems' from the Reflect recovery usb to create the correct BCD table entry.

Your new machine will now boot to the Windows exactly as it was installed on the old system, complete with all the installed software, but now running from a UEFI/GPT disk."

also, backup device drivers onto USB for clean install:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/68426-backup-restore-device-drivers-windows-10-a.html

thread of the above:
https://www.tenforums.com/backup-re...8-a-2.html?s=3ccb2ac73b05ceaafa5d1862c2485ad0

This sounds a bit more complicated then I would have wanted.
 
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M

Mega6

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A true clone doesn't care about partition type because in the end they will be the same. Either spring some cash for easy true cloning software in windows or use clonezilla or dd in linux.
 
R

Rev. Night

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So clonezilla will do it for free? Like every software out there says their free version will do stuff but then they all bait and switch
 
R

Rev. Night

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Right I read the site briefly. Linux based? I'm on Windows though. Was the program made in Linux?
 
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Rev. Night

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So in related news, it occured to me that everything i do now, I'm going to have to do down the road when PCI5 drives come out. That is the end goal -- OS on pci5 and some games 1TB, all rest of storage on the pci4 sn850x 2TB. 3TB storage is more than plenty for my uses. I've noticed the ploy of when you uninstall apps they suddenly give you a better deal than on the website. If i cant get clonezilla to work, i may just do that.
 
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Mega6

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Right now pci5 all come with annoying fans so currently pci4 is the way. Who knows pcie5 may not show benefits for years. Even when it does, the difference in boot times will be indistinguishable.
 
R

Rev. Night

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yeah im holding out until those fans aren't needed. my mobo comes with a heatsink and it sits right underneath my gpu anyways. no room for that fan
 
Zepher

Zepher

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I've been using Paragon's Migrate OS to SSD program for the past 11 years and had one migration not work in the hundreds I have done.
It used to be a $20 stand alone program but now it's incorporated into their Hard Disk Manager Suite that now costs $80 (it was $50 a few years back).
https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/migrate-os-to-ssd/

You can hook up the drives you want to migrate from and to and the system can read any drive with an OS and allow you to select it as a source.
in the below pics I was migrating from a 500GB drive to a 128GB SSD.

paragon-migrate-01.jpg IMG_1322.JPG

I recently used it to move OS's around a few NVME drives, 1TB Samsung to 2TB Samsung and a 1TB Samsung to 1TB WD.
 
Zepher

Zepher

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Rev. Night said:
jfc, from $20, to $50, to $80? What a ripoff
Click to expand...
Well, $20 was just the Migration software, the $50 and now $80 is the complete Hard Disk Manager Suite that includes the Migration portion.
It does suck if you only need the migration portion though, which is mainly what I use.
Also, for $80 you get 3 licenses so you can put it on 3 machines or share it with 2 other users.
Paragon Licenses.jpg

For some reason it shows 0 of 3 used and "Not Activated" even though I have it installed on my machine and my friend's machine.
 
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pendragon1

pendragon1

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get this working yet? if not: reclone with backupper(hirens has it too), remove old drive, boot.
if you want to convert to gpt:
go to restart like normal but hold shift when you click it to invoke advanced startup options.
click troubleshoot, click advance, open a command prompt enter: mbr2gpt /convert
 
Zepher

Zepher

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Rev. Night said:
Can i just pay you $20 for one of those licenses?
Click to expand...
It would be $27, split 3 ways, but I wouldn't really feel comfortable with my key going to someone I don't know. If the key got shared too many times, the license would be revoked.
 
R

Rev. Night

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pendragon1 said:
get this working yet? if not: reclone with backupper(hirens has it too), remove old drive, boot.
if you want to convert to gpt:
go to restart like normal but hold shift when you click it to invoke advanced startup options.
click troubleshoot, click advance, open a command prompt enter: mbr2gpt /convert
Click to expand...
I'm only able to work on it for like an hour or so a day at night, thus the slow progress.

And wouldn't converting the drive wipe out all data? Which is fine, I have 2 drives. Would it be possible:

1. Wipe drive
2. Convert to gpt
3. Disk clone from MBR drive
4. My new drive has previous OS + gpt? It won't change the drive type would it?
 
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pendragon1

pendragon1

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Rev. Night said:
I'm only able to work on it for like an hour or so a day at night, thus the slow progress.

And wouldn't converting the drive wipe out all data? Which is fine, I have 2 drives. Would it be possible:

1. Wipe drive
2. Convert to gpt
3. Disk clone from MBR drive
4. My new drive has previous OS + GBT? It won't change the drive type would it?
Click to expand...
ive only done it three times but drive contents stayed intact. backup if your worried. if you clone a mbr drive to one you pre-formatted as gpt, it will just revert back to mbr during the clone.
and i dont know what the GBT is you keep mentioning, typo?
 
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