Windows 7 refuses to boot from SSD after drive clone?

Lord Farquart said:
You mention Windows 7 in the thread title, but the thread is about a server????

Anyway, my experience is, many a time I got told the clone process was OK, where infact I screwed up something. Only believe the clone process was OK if the clone works. Untill then it was not. So go clone again.
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Yup, that was the call of the previous IT department, to use Windows 7 as the server OS. A brilliant choice if I do say so myself...

JK

As for the cloning process, I'm going to try again using Clonezilla tomorrow first thing when I'm back at the office, I'm hoping that this is the solution that we have been looking for.
 
@gamer16 have a look on carbonite, gumtree, olx and bidorbuy. I did see a couple Core 2 Extremes floating around there.
 
GipsyD said:
Yup, that was the call of the previous IT department, to use Windows 7 as the server OS. A brilliant choice if I do say so myself...

JK

As for the cloning process, I'm going to try again using Clonezilla tomorrow first thing when I'm back at the office, I'm hoping that this is the solution that we have been looking for.
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Are you using a desktop OS on server hardware, or is you hardware also desktop? If the former, I find that a bad idea.

Anyway, I like Macrium cloning software. It has served me well. If the clone does not work with Macrium, then you used wrong selections in the process. Keep at it untill tou get it to work, assumingnyou are cloning a good installation.
 
GipsyD said:
I know, I know. I am so tempted to do that, it's not even funny. The only issue that I face when doing this is facing grief from my superiors, who said that we must not format the hard drives under any circumstances, thus effectively throwing that option straight out of the window (no pun intended)

I think that the reason for not formatting the hard drives is the loss of work, even though we have multiple backups. It is at least a decades worth of work after all, so I would understand their fears
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Well you won't format original ide drive , do clean install on ssd , but backup data from old ide , if need be can pop old drive back in
 
UPDATE

I finally managed to get the SSD to boot with the OS migrated from the IDE HDD. The next issue that I am facing is that it cant find the Windows Loader Executable, as well as it stating that the BCD File has either been corrupted or misplaced.

Rebuilt the BCD File, but now the winload.exe file is an issue, thus preventing the machine from booting into the OS as planned. Working on the winload.exe error now. Startup repair is freaking useless here.

To get it to boot, I disabled Secure Boot and booted the SSD in AHCI mode, as well as disabling all other devices except the SSD (Network Card Included), then the SSD booted to the error screen as described above.
 
Have you tried to clone with Macrium Reflect Free. What I do is select the drive to clone, then select the new drive (make sure all the previous partitions are removed from the SSD). Then what I do is drag each partition down from the original drive to the new drive. This way it keeps the exact size of the original partition. you can always extend the partition later. Just make sure that each partition on the new drive is exactly the same size.

P.S. This can be done in windows, just make sure nobody is connected to the server, maybe unplug the network cable.
 
GipsyD said:
UPDATE

I finally managed to get the SSD to boot with the OS migrated from the IDE HDD. The next issue that I am facing is that it cant find the Windows Loader Executable, as well as it stating that the BCD File has either been corrupted or misplaced.

Rebuilt the BCD File, but now the winload.exe file is an issue, thus preventing the machine from booting into the OS as planned. Working on the winload.exe error now. Startup repair is freaking useless here.

To get it to boot, I disabled Secure Boot and booted the SSD in AHCI mode, as well as disabling all other devices except the SSD (Network Card Included), then the SSD booted to the error screen as described above.
Click to expand...

Try run Microsoft's DaRT off a flash drive. The quickest way for you to set up a USB to do so is look on piratebay for the latest windows 7 ISO (32 or 64 bit) compiled by murphy78 (checksums are clean) and then write the ISO as a bootable USB (rmprepusb is the easiest in my opinion)

Once in windows setup, go to tools then run the DaRT and see if that works. From there you can also run a command line and try fdisk the mbr
 
Greglsh said:
Have you tried to clone with Macrium Reflect Free. What I do is select the drive to clone, then select the new drive (make sure all the previous partitions are removed from the SSD). Then what I do is drag each partition down from the original drive to the new drive. This way it keeps the exact size of the original partition. you can always extend the partition later. Just make sure that each partition on the new drive is exactly the same size.

P.S. This can be done in windows, just make sure nobody is connected to the server, maybe unplug the network cable.
Click to expand...

Tried using Macrium Reflect, no dice. The SSD is given an boot error with Macrium and EaseUS. It's throwing the same error as stated above, that the BCD and winload.exe have either been corrupted, or have been deleted and cannot be found
 
agentrfr said:
Try run Microsoft's DaRT off a flash drive. The quickest way for you to set up a USB to do so is look on piratebay for the latest windows 7 ISO (32 or 64 bit) compiled by murphy78 (checksums are clean) and then write the ISO as a bootable USB (rmprepusb is the easiest in my opinion)

Once in windows setup, go to tools then run the DaRT and see if that works. From there you can also run a command line and try fdisk the mbr
Click to expand...

Will it not ask for some sort of activation key?
 
UPDATE

Interestingly enough, I created a second SSD on the same machine using a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate, and set that as my primary Boot Drive in the BIOS. I then set the SATA Configuration to AHCI Mode yet again, and booted the machine, hoping to be greeted by the Ultimate SSD, but instead found that the cloned SSD booted up just fine.

I removed the Second SSD from the system, and proceeded to reboot the machine, to find that the machine boots into the cloned SSD without a hitch whatsoever! I didn't even use the recovery tools or as @agentrfr said, the DaRT ISO from Microsoft.

My theory is that the fresh install of Ultimate drive mirrored with the cloned SSD on boot, and somehow fixed the missing file dependencies. Hey, I ain't complaining.

It just works - Todd Howard
 
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