Drive clone problems

Wing-Man · 10 Nov 2023 at 22:44

So i have cloned a few drives this week on the 4 systems in the house and ever one as failed.
the clone is good, and it will boot from the clone. but ones i pull(or format) the old drive nothing.
it will just post to windows recovery but cant be fixed in any way.

so the kids and my main rig that have all had NVMe 2tb upgrades over the past 2 week have all ended up been fresh installs.. for the kids not really a bad thing.

But my nas/play rig (not raid) i don't really want to lose the info on it.
when i say nas its more just plex not like a server... anyway what am i doing wrong

i using macrium reflect, doing a clone, booting from said clone, the on format or old drive pull its dead

Cyber-Mav · 11 Nov 2023 at 20:15

You tried the usual stuff e.g: sfc fixboot fixmbr rebuildbcd etc

Nemiyen · 11 Nov 2023 at 20:53

Try using Clonezilla and see if that works. I've had this recently where my Acronis True Image 2017 and 2015 will clone a disk but it fails to boot. You need to fix the boot things after for some reason. My guess is I fixed it before and made some part of the UEFI boot non standard so it fails to boot.

Clonezilla worked first time and cloned the drive without needing to fix or run any tools afterwards.

mrk · 11 Nov 2023 at 23:50

What process are you using in Reflect to do the clone? I've used Reflect multiple times this year and each time worked perfectly aside from once when I manually configured a clone instead of letting it do its thing. Corrected the error, recloned and all's well.

Wing-Man · 12 Nov 2023 at 10:28

mrk said:
What process are you using in Reflect to do the clone? I've used Reflect multiple times this year and each time worked perfectly aside from once when I manually configured a clone instead of letting it do its thing. Corrected the error, recloned and all's well.

Just clicking clone this drive.. and picking the destination drive. I’ve used it before a lot but now it just not working after the clone.
I’ve never had a problem before.

I’m going to try clonezilla today

Mcnumpty2323 · 12 Nov 2023 at 19:24

Sounds like it's seeing 2 drives
In the boot record
So once you remove/format the old drive
It's looking for a drive that is no longer there

Try
On the new/destination drive
Before formatting/removing the old drive
Run msconfig
Go to boot tab in it
See if it lists 2 entries (or more)
One will be labelled current and default
Select the other and select delete
Remove/format the old drive
Now on boot it should only be looking for 1 drive

Other option
Don't know if free version macrium includes it
Make a bootable rescue usb
If it does make one
Boot from it and in I think other tasks section
It has a very good fix boot tool
Definitely found it better than going to Windows recovery
And using bootrec commands

Last option (again don't know if free version allows using viboot)
Don't clone use create image instead
This is more time consuming as you make an image
Then test it before you deploy it
With the images I install Macrium viboot
It allows you to test your image works
By booting it in a VM