Quick backstory is I'm a college student and I gave my younger sister my now well-aged gaming rig to use for her schoolwork so she'd have her own computer. Now, I'm having a tough time taking it back away from her, so I decided to just build another rig, as my 3570k was starting to show its age anyways. However, I did want to hold onto my Samsung 850 evo 500gb ssd, so I bought a cheap 500gb hdd from seagate to replace it with. Where I run into my issue is getting all her data from the SSD to the HDD. To be clear, I'm taking all of these actions on the old rig that's been up and running since 2014, not the new computer I'm building myself.
I tried using a few cloning tools, and eventually landed on Clonezilla. Everything seemed to go fine, except once the clone was complete, every time I tried to boot off the HDD with the cloned OS, it would display a black screen with a blinking white underscore (the cursor presumably). I couldn't type anything, and after waiting five minutes and nothing changing, I shut down and went back to my initial installation on my SSD.
I did some searching, and I saw that other people were getting an option to make the drive bootable right before the clone began. I ran clonezilla again as a sanity check, and the option never popped up for me. It seemed like one of the issues was that on the SSD there was a separate 500mb partition, which I did not clone with Clonezilla. My guess was that this was where the bootloader was, as I had previously messed around with a few different linux distros, although they had been removed some time ago and Windows was obviously still working normally on the ssd. So, I created a 500mb partition on my hard drive and copied over the files, but I was faced with the same issue.
Upon further research, it seemed like making my drive bootable wasn't as simple as cloning that partition (if that even was the boot loader), so I looked into how to do a fresh install of the boot loader onto the drive. I plugged in a live installation of Windows and got into the command prompt and tried using bootrec /FixMBR and /FixBoot after navigating to the root directory of my hard drive (D:). Both operations completed without error and gave me a confirmation message indicating they worked successfully, but I was still getting the same black screen with a blinking cursor when I tried to boot off the hard drive.
I'm stuck on where to go from here, and I haven't found a ton of people going from SSDs to HDDs, as most people are upgrading their systems so they're going the other way around. While in my original installation, I've been able to access files in the cloned drive, and when I boot to my ssd I get an error that there's multiple installations of windows intalled, and I have to manually select the correct installation (the one on the ssd) each time I want to be able to use Windows. I tried unplugging the ssd and just letting it go off the hdd, which didn't work. Then I formatted the drive and installed windows, which worked fine, then re-cloned the ssd, still no luck.
I'm not sure what sort of error messages I can attach, as the computer posts fine and there aren't any indications of the drive failing to initialize or anything, but I'd be more than happy to provide any information that would make this any easier to diagnose.
Thanks in advance,
Dylan
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