Computer not booting cloned Drive

[Tsar_Maple]

Hi friends,

 

I just got my WD Black M.2 NVMe drive today. I'm replacing my old Sandisk 64GB boot drive with it. I'm using the WD cloning software to copy all the goods from the Sandisk over to the WD drive.

 

That's all gone well. I've checked to see if both drives are GPT, and they are. Yet when I remove the old drive from my boot order and save & exit, the computer will either turn off and keep rebooting, or go to a blank screen where my mouse will have a stuttering loading cursor. I can't figure out why the NVMe drive isn't booting properly.

 

The Sandisk still boots just fine when put into the boot order. 

 

If it helps for context, I'm using an ASRocks B350 Pro4 motherboard. 

[Snipergod87]

Is the boot order set correctly?

[Tsar_Maple]

3 minutes ago, CUDAcores89 said:

Well there are about a hundred differnt possible problems to this, and it's possible it could be about a hundred different reasons this isn't working.

 

Let's start with the basics:

 

1. Disable CSM if you can in the UEFI. The UEFI may be trying to boot from an AHCI drive and you now have an NVME drive, which is not the same.

 

2. Unplug every single other storage medium from your PC so it has to boot form your new NVME drive.

 

More complicated:

 

How exactly did you clone this drive? Did you just highlight and copy paste in windows? Because that doesn't work. You need to clone the ENTIRE drive and all it's partitions, including the files you can't see and thus, can't copy. I suggest using macrium reflect. They have a free version that you can use to do the clone. 

 

Even if you used whatever software WD gave you, I would HIGHLY suggest going back and doing the clone again with a third party software, only because I know Things like:

 

1. Easeus todo backup

2. Macrium reflect

3. achronis trueimage (if you want to pay for it)

 

Actually all work. 

 

I have no experience with the WD cloning software

 

 

I used WD Acronis to clone. I'm thinking it has to do with UEFI options, I'm just not sure how to navigate/get to it in the ASRocks BIOS.

[Tsar_Maple]

9 minutes ago, Snipergod87 said:

Is the boot order set correctly?

Yup

[Tsuki]

clean install. cloning has a million and one ways it can go wrong, and it can even be a bad clone if it does 'boot properly'.

 

you're cloning from a 64GB drive. there is nothing on it thats important enough that you couldnt just do a clean install and have it actually work properly.

[Tsar_Maple]

17 minutes ago, Tsuki said:

clean install. cloning has a million and one ways it can go wrong, and it can even be a bad clone if it does 'boot properly'.

 

you're cloning from a 64GB drive. there is nothing on it thats important enough that you couldnt just do a clean install and have it actually work properly.

That's my backup plan. Will probably be doing that tomorrow. Time to dig out the flash drive...