OS Transfer Issue

SmaxBang · July 9, 2019

Hi all,

At work I use an Optiplex 7060. It will frequently randomly shutdown and upon reboot will be unable to find a boot device. Another restart will let it boot into Windows. After some research online it seems most likely the M.2 is failing and this is why I run into this issue. The computer has already been reformatted several times. I did a clone of the M.2 to a new HDD and changed it to be the device that loads after POST in my BIOS. The computer will load normally this way. However, when I disabled the M.2 in the BIOS the computer said it could not find a valid boot device even though the other drive is still set as the current boot drive. Does anyone have any idea why it wont boot from the cloned drive after disabling the original?

Mira Yurizaki · July 9, 2019

Check what was actually copied on the HDD. If you see at least two partitions, one of them fairly small (several hundred megabytes), then I feel at least confident the bootloader was copied. However, since cloning will likely copy everything verbatim, the parameters the bootloader may not be valid for the hard drive.

Either way, and I'm doing a shameless plug, you might be able to fix it by looking at this guide:

SmaxBang · July 9, 2019

Thanks! I'll take a look and hopefully give an update soon. Also here is a pic of the two drives. Disk 0 is the cloned drive.

Annihlator · July 10, 2019

Please do note that EFI bootloaders may well reference a certain volume(/offset) on the same disk, or occasionally by "GUID", meaning that with the same bootloader it may look for a volume which isn't available, not set as a Boot volume, or even is in a different order (although the latter shouldnt happen when cloning complete disks).
I've added the output of my own bcdedit just as an example how the bootloader can be configured; in this example a GUID {9dea862c-5cdd-4e70-acc1-f32b344d4795} is listed to reference my own bootable volume.

As far as I've run into issues with those for me the "easiest" fix was to use a Windows installation media, enter recovery, and use diskpart'sfixmbr/ fixboot and rebuildbcd toggles as Mira's guide also suggests I've yet to encounter the first time it didn't helped me solve an issue like this where it wasn't because of my own error I personally can't claim to fully understand which GUID's are used where in BCDedit and hence have refrained from manually editing it I do however occasionaly save the output of "bcdedit /v" as a "just in case".