Question Cloned boot drive won't boot. How to change the letter drive to C when is not available any more

[Bob the Blob]

Hi,

I have two boot drives on my PC. The second one was cloned from a laptop. I cannot boot on this drive, as the device is said to be inaccessible. I've got the hint it is due to the driver letter, which is allocated as D, while it is normally C. The problem is I cannot change it to C, because the primary boot drive is already C. What can I do?

Thanks.

PS. By the way, Bing ChatGPT was completely clueless when asked.

 

[Lafong]

What happens when you disconnect the other drive, so that ONLY the cloned drive is connected? Does it boot and operate properly?

What is your ultimate intent?

Do you really want to have 2 bootable drives in the machine, long term?

It isn't clear why you would clone a laptop installation to a PC. Hope you can provide full details.

 

[DSzymborski]

Yeah, Windows is not intended to be modular in this fashion. Booting on a PC from a clone of a laptop being a good idea would need a very unusual set of facts. Some elaboration would be useful.

 

[TerryLaze]

Hi,

I have two boot drives on my PC. The second one was cloned from a laptop. I cannot boot on this drive, as the device is said to be inaccessible. I've got the hint it is due to the driver letter, which is allocated as D, while it is normally C. The problem is I cannot change it to C, because the primary boot drive is already C. What can I do?

Thanks.

PS. By the way, Bing ChatGPT was completely clueless when asked.

Booting from the first would make the second show up as D and vice versa.
The drive you boot from automatically becomes C no matter what it shows up as when you boot from a different drive.
The cloned disk doesn't boot because it expects the laptop hardware.

Where does it tell you it's inaccessible? If you can't open the cloned drive from windows then it's bitlocked or otherwise protected.

If you still have the original or if you have another free drive, look up 'clone to dissimilar' it will strip the clone from any drivers that could cause issues.

 

[BFG-9000]

Definitely not enough info as we don't know if it's MBR or GPT or encrypted or whatever.

The usual suggestions are, with only one drive installed, some combination of fdisk /mbr or bootrec /fixmbr or bootrec /fixboot or bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr but these will often not help you if there is a separate boot partition, as those may then unhelpfully assign C: to that 100MB partition.

The other suggestion commonly resorted to is to use Diskpart, list/select disk if needed (it shouldn't be if you have only one drive attached), and then list/select volume of the boot partition and enter "remove" to remove the drive letter C from it. Change to the Windows volume and then "assign letter=c". Problem is... this always seems to revert after a reboot and startup repair.

The brute force approach is to use a new/unpartitioned disk and install Windows on it. Then clone your old laptop system partition over the newly installed Windows one. At least then you may see some different error messages if it still doesn't boot

 

[Bob the Blob]

What happens when you disconnect the other drive so that ONLY the cloned drive is connected? Does it boot and operate properly?

What is your ultimate intent?

Do you want to have 2 bootable drives in the machine in, the long term?

It isn't clear why you would clone a laptop installation to a PC. Hope you can provide full details.

Both drives are M2 SSD. So, it’s a bit of a hassle to take the primary one out, as it is in RAID 0 and I don’t want to risk losing it.

Basically, the primary disk is my home disk and my second one would be my professional one from my work laptop. I would like to home both disks into the the same rig to save some space and to avoid redundant cables to share my monitors.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I would like to home both disks into the the same rig to save some space and to avoid redundant cables to share my monitors.

Can you show screenshot from Disk Management with all drives visible?
(upload to imgur.com and post link)

 

[Bob the Blob]

Definitely not enough info as we don't know if it's MBR or GPT or encrypted or whatever.

The usual suggestions are, with only one drive installed, some combination of fdisk /mbr or bootrec /fixmbr or bootrec /fixboot or bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr but these will often not help you if there is a separate boot partition, as those may then unhelpfully assign C: to that 100MB partition.

The other suggestion commonly resorted to is to use Diskpart, list/select disk if needed (it shouldn't be if you have only one drive attached), and then list/select volume of the boot partition and enter "remove" to remove the drive letter C from it. Change to the Windows volume and then "assign letter=c". Problem is... this always seems to revert after a reboot and startup repair.

The brute force approach is to use a new/unpartitioned disk and install Windows on it. Then clone your old laptop system partition over the newly installed Windows one. At least then you may see some different error messages if it still doesn't boot

Hi, I tried those methods. Either C: is already taken by the first disk or diskpart does not even recognize the second disk. I have already tried to fix the disk with the repair boot tool.

Both disks are GPT. No encryption. Windows 11 on the first one and Windows 10 on the second one.

I even tried easyBCD to create a dual bootloader. Did not work.

I just find it strange there is no easy way to have two boot disks on the same PC and just be able to choose the one you want to work on.

 

[Bob the Blob]

Yeah, Windows is not intended to be modular in this fashion. Booting on a PC from a clone of a laptop being a good idea would need a very unusual set of facts. Some elaboration would be useful.

Yeah, it's my feeling as well. But I managed to do that on an older rig with Windows 8 and a cloned laptop drive with Windows 7. It worked without hassle or sophisticated methods.

 

[TerryLaze]

I just find it strange there is no easy way to have two boot disks on the same PC and just be able to choose the one you want to work on.

It is fairly simple if you know some basic things.
Your issue is that the cloned drive is "inaccessible" which you are making zero effort towards explaining, this is either due to some security issue or a driver if it's on a different controller or maybe even something else.
If you don't show us anything that could tell us why it's "inaccessible" we won't be much help.
When diskpart does not even recognize the second disk then there is something more going on then just making a boot menu.

 

[BFG-9000]

If you are using RAID 0, then any drive you add may need to be configured as a member of a single-drive RAID "array" in the RAID module BIOS in order to be seen in Diskpart.

The other problem with this is if the laptop wasn't set up as RAID, then its Windows installation will not have RAID drivers installed so won't have any drivers for the disk controller and thus will also crash, but later. It would be seriously annoying to not only have to change the boot priority but also RAID vs AHCI each time you want to boot to the other drive.

 

[DSzymborski]

Yeah, it's my feeling as well. But I managed to do that on an older rig with Windows 8 and a cloned laptop drive with Windows 7. It worked without hassle or sophisticated methods.

That's simply good fortune. It can work, but it mostly doesn't, especially in older Windows. Sometimes it even looks fine, but there are a panoply of problems underneath the surface that stealthily cause instability and less-than-ideal performance. This is not a good solution.

You can certainly simplify this process by canning the RAID. RAID 0 is about as useful for an OS on an SSD as a racing stripe is on a lawn mower. Possibly even worse in that the racing stripe won't cause you to lose data or make troubleshooting the lawn mower far more difficult.

 

[USAFRet]

Yeah, it's my feeling as well. But I managed to do that on an older rig with Windows 8 and a cloned laptop drive with Windows 7. It worked without hassle or sophisticated methods.

Simple luck.

Moving a drive+OS to a different system, there are 3 possible outcomes:
1. It works just fine
2. It fails completely.
3. It "works", but you're chasing issues for weeks/months.

You are in #2.

And this isn't even addressing that RAID 0 config.