Cloning Boot SATA SSD to NVME

[timechaser]

Hi to all the knowledgeable folks here.

I bought a Sabrent Rocket Q NVME disk during the black friday sale. Installing it was a piece of cake. Drive was recognised and was super fast using crystalmark.

I then spent most of today trying to clone my SSD to the NVME to speed up my boot sequence. Did manage to speed it up but without the NVME... never got that to boot up. Here is what I tried...

1. Cloning with Acronis (was sh1t) and Macrium Reflect (much better)

2. Found that I need to have both the SSD and the NVME in GPT mode instead of MBR - did that too, and cloned yet again...

3. Tried to use bcdboot to redo the boot files as well (had to create a bootable USB for this)

4. And yes I remembered to disconnect the SSD too

Nothing worked. Every single time I tried to boot from my NVME, it showed me the Windows logo, with a circle going round and round... but never booting up (left it on for 30 mins as well).

Mobo is Gigabyte B130 with the latest firmware. Have set boot sequence to UEFI as well.

And for the life of me, I can NOT figure out what is wrong and why I can't make this work.

Re-installing Win10 from scratch is obviously a great idea but will be a PITA to get all the apps I have. Besides taking time. I might end up with this option to just make it clean BUT I would dearly love to make the cloning work.

Anyone been through this sh1t? Any clues be much appreciated.

Oh - and I did spend a lot of time trawling through the interwebs to find something but man this seems to be a minefield. Seems to be a 50% hit rate...

 

[EJB]

Somebody mentioned that you need the same nVME enclosure branded (Sabrent) to do the cloning by Acronis. I read it off Amazon's review.

Honestly, I don't like to clone OS disks. I normally only clone data or my programs disks (or copy 1-1 in that matter).

OS wise I rather reinstall everything, will be painful to re-install, but at least it's cleaner.

 

[goodchong]

i have migrated my os from 840 pro SATA ssd to nvme adata x8200pro using acronis true image without problem

 

[timechaser]

Thanks goodchong. Can you guide me with the basics of the steps you took?

EJB - I would reinstall too, but way too many programs... perhaps I should take this as an opportunity to just clean up! And yes I am using Sabrent and Acronis was the free proggy with that but it suxked

 

[EJB]

Thanks goodchong. Can you guide me with the basics of the steps you took?

EJB - I would reinstall too, but way too many programs... perhaps I should take this as an opportunity to just clean up! And yes I am using Sabrent and Acronis was the free proggy with that but it suxked

I know how you feel, I just went Win10 last Nov, bought all new SSDs so that during 'migration', I can plug back my Win7 to continue working. I much wanted to do the 'upgrade route' but... oh well.

As for the free Acronis, some recommended to go to the website and download instead of using the one provided. Try that?

 

[skrekro]

I had somewhat the same issue, turns out for some weird reason my boot drive is my located at my MX500 ssd while the windows is in another nvme HP EX920. I have to have both of them together to boot. When I cloned the Windows on the nvme, it couldn't boot. Cloning the other makes no sense as it didn't have the Windows file. Couldn't make sense of it

So I had to bite the bullet and just do a fresh install.

 

[timechaser]

I know how you feel, I just went Win10 last Nov, bought all new SSDs so that during 'migration', I can plug back my Win7 to continue working. I much wanted to do the 'upgrade route' but... oh well.

As for the free Acronis, some recommended to go to the website and download instead of using the one provided. Try that?

Thanks boss - will try that. Found another route atm of creating a system image / restore... will try that first and report back

 

[ahwei91]

can try the free version of Easybcd to make ur new drive bootable....

 

[Assault]

Thanks goodchong. Can you guide me with the basics of the steps you took?

EJB - I would reinstall too, but way too many programs... perhaps I should take this as an opportunity to just clean up! And yes I am using Sabrent and Acronis was the free proggy with that but it suxked

I used the provided Acronis to clone my previous NVMe SSD to new Sabrent one. Worked flawlessly. What are you expecting the program to do for you?

 

[timechaser]

I am expecting it to do what it did, but the nvme doesn't boot up after the cloning. I cloned, disconnected the SATA SSD and then tried to boot from the nvme but it never booted - let it for 30 minutes.

 

[Illusionist_85]

Reinstall is preferred method. If windows, just do a backup of your account folder and the browser folder or other files or folders u created.

https://unetbootin.github.io/


Posted from PCWX using Rem mm is best waifu

 

[LiLAsN]

If it doesn't boot, that's because even after you created a clone of the OS drive, the boot sector has changed. So you need to go back into the UEFI BIOS and change the boot sector. Make sure it recognizes the new drive and mentions your new NVMe drive name as opposed to the old drive's name.

 

[yau_chee]

Did you clone all the hidden system and recovery partition?

 

[Clearnfc]

If nothing works, got "free" cloning software I always use.

go download R-Drive Image from r-tt.com

Its a 30 days trial but good enough. Full function for 30 days. I usually clone using this tool.

 

[timechaser]

@Illusionist - that's what I ended up doing after I managed to kill my older boot disk! Was quite the journey

@LiLaSn I could see the drive in the UEFI bios, but couldnt see the bootloader / windows boot manager. UEFI has a whole host of differing things compared to old times. I could see the drive but it wasn't registered as a bootable drive. I tried to rebuild the master boot record (bcdbuild, bootrec etc.) but nothing worked.

@yau_chee - yes I cloned the hidden system and recovery partitions. Apparently even after that, under the GPT/UEFI category, you need to use other commands to move the bootloader explicitly to the other drive! Duh! Discovered this much much later

@Clearnfc - Thanks a lot. Will keep this in mind. I tried Acronis, Clonezilla and Macrium Reflect but none of them worked.