Cloning system to a bigger SSD drive

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zahratustra

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I got myself a bigger SSD drive (500 gigs) and wanted to clone my original smaller (238 gigs) SSD onto it. Cloning went ok as far as I can tell BUT
1 -system refuses to boot from the new drive. When I go to BIOS I can see my D drive and CD drive but not the new drive. When I go to the Boot Selection drive is visible but when i click on it I'm getting "Status 0xc000000e" and "bootselection failed faile because required device is inaccessible" message. Before cloning I've initialized the new drive but that's all that I did. Should I have done something more?
During cloning the bigger drive was labelled as F. but I thought that I'll change it later - does that matter?
2- I've checked what's "status 0xc000000e" means and, apparently, it means that BCD is corrupt or misconfigured. Could it be that cloning wasn't successful?
3- when I reconnect my original C drive, I can see F drive but it shows up as the same size as the original C drive (238 gigs) with another 227 gigs showing up as "unallocated"



Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
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How did you clone it?
 
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"EaseUS Todo backup free" utility have cloning function. Connected new drive as an "F" drive and cloned my C drive onto it. Didn't get any options if I want to use bigger space or anything
 
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I'd recommend doing disk cloning offline, by making a bootable DVD or USB stick with something like Acronis, or the free Clonezilla.

I would definitely try the cloning again using different method, before trying to troubleshoot the current situation.
 
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There is another thing I'm not sure about up there: BIOS doesn't recognize SSD is inside unless it starts at boot device choice.

1. First you shoud check if BIOS for whatever reason isn't using AHCI mode for disk drives and switch the mode. If that's set, perhaps you need to flash (patch) BIOS to higher version which you should check at motherboard site.

2. Do #1 first please.

3. That's nothing wrong. You may resize it later.
 
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Yeah, I thought it was just too damn simple. I will try utilities you've recommended. But what do you mean by "offline"?
And thanks for your help Ripper.
 
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In the old days of BIOS, things were more clear cut. But with UEFI you can get a lot more strange interactions, and there's various reasons it could fail to register a disk as a boot option. I wouldn't worry about all that yet - try to ensure you have a good clone first.

EDIT: By "offline" I mean not cloning from within the running operatiing system. By booting to a boot disk, the OS stays offline, and the disk can be imaged perfectly without complications.
 
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Talk gentle to me Ripper, I'm not an IT guy. I mean I build my own machine and I'm able to install and reinstall OS but that's as far as it goes. So, if possible, could you please give some sort of step by tutorial?
 
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Sorry mate, can't get into it right now. I'll give some more instructions later, if you haven't had any luck.
 
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No problem what so ever, one more question though: since Acronis trial version has cloning disabled I wanted to try Clonezilla but does it work with Windows? All the downloads seems to be Linux based.
 
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zahratustra said:
No problem what so ever, one more question though: since Acronis trial version has cloning disabled I wanted to try Clonezilla but does it work with Windows? All the downloads seems to be Linux based.
Click to expand...

You can always boot into linux from a DVD/CD/USB and then use Linux tools you have available once the OS has started up. This requires making bootable linux media first - this will not touch your system disk at all, so you can do things like Ripper suggested once you have booted from the media you created:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/build-bootable-linux-live-cd/
 
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Sometimes after imaging, the drive needs a little adjustment.

I usually use Macrium Reflect

Here's some instructions how to use.

Don't forget the recovery media step, as you need that sometimes to prep the newly imaged drive if you run into errors.
 
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Trying Macrium Reflect now Caddy. Will report how it went asap
 
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Ok, thanks to you guys I did it! Cloning with Macrium was straight forward and I've learned how to enlarge smaller partition of the old drive to the larger size of of the new one with MiniTool Partition Wizard. Then things got a bit strange because with old C drive attached I could boot from the new drive but when C drive as removed I got Status 0xc000000e device inaccessible error again. And then I remembered Caddy's advice about recovery media step. Followed that and it all clicked. Now I have fully operational SSD system drive with almost twice the capacity of the old one. And let's hope that it stays that way :)
Thank you everybody!
 
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Since i use an SSD to boot also I'll recommend not to install games to your boot drive only use it for the O/S and games should be on another drive, you could use something like steammover to relocate your games to d or e drives, also don't download to C drive use another drive. This will keep you boot drive fairly manageable and easier to backup.

Shaf
 
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I would generally agree with shaf though SSDs mitigate a lot of issues that would have made this great advice to now just good advice. By having files on separate disks you can improve throughput on data access but SSDs are now so fast that IO isn't really as much of a bottleneck.

Personally I use a 256 SSD as my Windows/boot drive. Windows takes up way too much space so just leave it to take it all with miscellaneous programs and documents. I have left C as my download folder but it does become something I have to move/backup every couple of months. Games are installed either on an another SSD or a 7200k RPM depending on if there will be a boost by running on SSD and I have space but moving stuff back and forth can be annoying. Thankfully steam now supports doing that easily now. Used this setup for 2-3 years and has worked well for me.
 
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One of these days I should clone my windows ssd to a new one. My concern is write cycles on the boot disk (which has the home folder for game saves). Sadly I can't make a backup or rescue disk because like an idiot i used a mounted volume for my game partition. With windows 7 this was fine but windows 10 gets all fucked up with mounted volume. If i want to make a rescue disk or simliar it requires something large enough for both the boot disk and the mounted volume. (there are other issues with windows 10 and mounted volume). The only reason I don't scrape the mounted volume is that (again shitty windows design) the registry has references to the mounted volume so there is no easy way to convert it to a letter drive (unless I want to unstall all the games on it).
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What a fuck up in multiple ways. I'll probably have to use linux to clone the disk but concern that windows 10 will find a way to deactivate itself or otherwise fuck things up (at least the original disk should be preserved). I have so much hate for MS shitty software.
 
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My setup is as follows:

1) 256gb SSD for the boot partition, for OS, programs and games (C: )
2) A couple 1 TB drives setup in RAID 1 for the data partition, and redirect all user data folders to this drive as default (D: )
3) Separate old POS machine as my file server (and FTP server) running RAID 5, and just map the shared folder for movies and photos and game backups, ISO files, etc etc (M: )

Why:
- Programs and games run fast
- Data such as savegames/media/documents are redundantly protected from drive failure
- If run into massive OS issues, I can swap the drive and/or re-install the OS without touching the user data folders
- It's fairly inexpensive vs going to a full SSD setup (since I have access to eleventy billion free 1 TB drives from work).
 
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