Question Can't boot from new hard drive

[NightAntilli]

Hi there...

So, a friend's laptop was suddenly acting super slow, and SMART was giving a bunch of hard drive warnings, so I suspected it was the hard drive slowing things down. He didn't want to lose anything, so after he bought a new hard drive (WD Black 500GB 7200 RPM), I proposed to clone the hard drive for him and put the new hard drive in his laptop...

The way I did it was by creating in image of the old hard drive with DriveImage XML, and afterwords restoring the image to the new hard drive. I confirmed that the new drive was working on the PC I did the cloning. All files were visible just like the older one.
However... When I put the new hard drive in the laptop, I get an error asking for a valid boot device... I tried the old one again, and that one boots. So... What gives? Any advice?

 

[USAFRet]

"DriveImage XML " ?
If this were a decade ago, that might have been a viable tool.

Today, not even a little bit.

Macrium Reflect, Acronis TrueImage...all MUCH better for 2019.
Your clone operation missed the boot partition. Or did it incorrectly.

But, given a drive that is already failing...an actual clone is strongly not recommended.

 

[NightAntilli]

"DriveImage XML " ?
If this were a decade ago, that might have been a viable tool.

Today, not even a little bit.

Really? It was always a viable tool, and I didn't think there was a reason it would not work anymore...

Macrium Reflect, Acronis TrueImage...all MUCH better for 2019.
Your clone operation missed the boot partition. Or did it incorrectly.

Ok. I'll try again with one of those.

But, given a drive that is already failing...an actual clone is strongly not recommended.

Agreed. I warned him, but, he wants to anyway. I already said he would probably be better off with a fresh install with the new hard drive.