Windows Broke After Cloning to SSD Please Help!

[Excalibur20]

For TL; DR Go to the @

So, before I get into the main problem let me tell you what led up to it. I bought a new 120 GB SSD to where I planned to move Windows. Windows was already running on a 1 TB HDD that came installed on the computer. Given that the SSD was smaller than the hard drive I couldn't clone it right off the bat. I installed the cloning tool (AOMEI Backupper) and proceeded to back up my HDD to an external Seagate drive using this backup and cloning tool. Then I reset Windows to clear the drive of all files making it small enough to be cloned to the SSD. After setting Windows up again, I reinstalled AOMEI and cloned the drive. After cloning I went into my bios to change my boot drive to the SSD. This is where I ran into my first problem, the bios didn't recognize an OS on the SSD. After several attempts to re-clone the hard drive and try again, I decided to do a 'System Backup' as AOMEI calls it, of the hard drive to my external Seagate and then recover it to my SSD, essentially cloning the drive to the SSD. After doing that I went back to the bios to change that boot drive and… it worked, Windows was installed to the SSD Yay? Not really though. @When I booted in everything seemed fine so I recovered the hard drive that I backed up with all my personal files. While doing this I went to open settings, and settings would crash the second I would open it. Disk management wouldn’t open, instead showing an MMC window saying, “Unable to create new document”. After that, I got a Windows Defender notification and when I tried to open it, Windows defender crashed just like the settings app. I ran system file checker and it discovered corrupt files but was unable to fix them. At this point I was like screw it, I’m just gonna move back to the original hard drive. (remember I backed it up before resetting Windows). So I shut down and removed the SSD only to boot back up and find myself staring at a Windows recovery screen. It gave me 3 options: F8 to go to startup settings, ESC to launch the bios, and F1 to start the recovery process. However, pressing F8 would do nothing and when I pressed F1 the computer would reboot and show this screen (The first picture) for a second only to go back to the blue recovery screen (second picture). I am at a loss for what to do, so if anyone has any ideas on how to get windows to work or on how to recover my hard drive please let me know. Thank you very much for any help.

[GoodBytes]

Please do not clone drives. Cloning does not include any error correction. Cloning of drive was designed to replicate 2 identical drives (down to firmware version).

What you want to do is do an image of the drive, and deploy it on the other drive. OR you want to clean install Windows, and your programs, and transfer your files.

[Excalibur20]

24 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Please do not clone drives. Cloning does not include any error correction. Cloning of drive was designed to replicate 2 identical drives (down to firmware version).

What you want to do is do an image of the drive, and deploy it on the other drive. OR you want to clean install Windows, and your programs, and transfer your files.

I ended up making an image of the drive then restoring it to my SSD and that is how I got Windows to boot on the SSD in the first place but during the restoration process some system files were corrupted making Windows not work properly. Also, I cloned the drive on my main machine to an SSD and I works great to this day with zero problems.

[Mr.Humble]

12 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Please do not clone drives. Cloning does not include any error correction. Cloning of drive was designed to replicate 2 identical drives (down to firmware version).

What you want to do is do an image of the drive, and deploy it on the other drive. OR you want to clean install Windows, and your programs, and transfer your files.

I agree it's often better to do a fresh install, but I have on multiple occasions migrated OS installations with no issues.

 

Just had to do it with a reputable software such as Paragon or Acronis

[homeap5]

Clone OS using Macrium Reflect rescue USB (created from Macrium Reflect installation). Do not clone system that is active - it rely on VSS service that sometimes is not a good idea.