Question 1TB SSD drive not booting

[peter sandford]

I have an Acer Aspire GX-785 circa 2016. It came with a 128Gb SSD drive, a 3TB HDD data drive and 16Gb DDR RAM and windows 10. The 128 drive is on the motherboard in an NVMe slot but seen as SATA Port 0. The 3Gb HDD is Port 3 and the Optical Disk is Port 5. Nothing is on Ports 2 or 4.

For the last few years I've been fighting for space on the 128Gb boot drive, installing whatever new software that I could on the 3Tb data HDD, so I finally bought a WD 1TbPCIe/NVMe drive to upgrade. I didn't have room to install the WD Acronis cloning software and was advised by their SanDisk support group [WD SSD drives are SanDisk] that it had to be installed on the boot drive and needed a minimum of 5-6Gb free space. Most of the software was installed over the years and I'm afraid I wont find the original software never mind the codes and setup configurations

My wife's boss has both the Acronis software and auxiliary devices to connect both NVMe drives so I cloned the 1Tb from the 128Gb. I used the clone with "boot on this machine" option. I had previously attempted "boot on another machine" option without success.

When I install the new 1Tb SSD drive in the onboard NVMe slot and attempt to start it fails and I got the "inaccessible boot device" error. When looking in the BIOS, the drive is shown as an M.2 PCIe SSD with the correct information but it is shown under the listings of the SATA drives even though it is in the onboard slot. There doesn't appear to be any option to select this drive as the boot device, or make it a SATA drive.

There is only 1 NVMe slot on the motherboard so I had purchased an NVMe/PCIe adapter card for a spare PCIe slot before I discovered that I couldn't install Acronis. If I have the original 128Gb on the M/B and the 1Tb on the adapter, both devices show in Windows Drive Manager and essentially the same content after the cloning. In this configuration, BIOS shows the 128Gb as SATA Port 0 and the 1Tb as M.2 PCIe SSD at the bottom of the list.

Any insights or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[USAFRet]

My wife's boss has both the Acronis software and auxiliary devices to connect both NVMe drives so I cloned the 1Tb from the 128Gb. I used the clone with "boot on this machine" option.

You're doing it wrong. It is trying to boot from the parameters of the boss's PC, not the one where it will live.

 

[peter sandford]

You're doing it wrong. It is trying to boot from the parameters of the boss's PC, not the one where it will live.

I tried the other option first... unsuccessfully

 

[USAFRet]

Any insights or suggestions would be appreciated.

On a different system, you can install and Run Macrium Reflect.
Create a RescueUSB.
You will use this to boot from.

Then, this:
1x m.2 slot with an Image

Assuming you have another drive (any type of drive) with sufficient free space to hold the entirety of your current m.2 drive:

1. Download and install Macrium Reflect
2. Run that, and create a Rescue CD or USB (you'll use this later). "Other Tasks". Create this on a small USB flash drive or DVD.
3. In the Macrium client, create an Image to some other drive. External USB HDD, maybe. Select all partitions. This results in a file of xxxx.mrimage
4. When done, power OFF.
5. Swap the 2 drives
6. Boot up from the Rescue USB you created earlier.
7. Restore (on the toolbar), and tell it where the Image is that you created in step 3, and which drive to apply it to...the new m.2
8. Go, and wait until it finishes.
9. That's all...this should work.

 

[TerryLaze]

My wife's boss has both the Acronis software and auxiliary devices to connect both NVMe drives so I cloned the 1Tb from the 128Gb. I used the clone with "boot on this machine" option. I had previously attempted "boot on another machine" option without success.

The default option could be for it to only copy the existing partitions without the boot info needed.
You need to use the migration tool/option

or do a 1:1 exact clone that will result in the 1Tb drive showing up as 128Gb until you resize it.