Cloned hard drive won't boot

[MidnightZero]

Up until now, I had an old 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD. It was using the Master Boot Record scheme. I recently bought a new 3TB Seagate Barracuda HDD. I have a lot of Steam games and files on my 1TB HDD so I decided to clone everything over to my new one using Macrium Reflect software. It cloned as an MBR drive but I wanted one 3TB partition so I was forced to convert it into a GPT drive using Aomei Partition Assistant software. I unplugged my old HDD and tried booting with my new one but nothing happened. Not even my motherboard recognises that it has an OS to boot. Please note that my motherboard is UEFI compatible so that shouldn't be a problem. I have started to think that I need to re-install Windows 10 for the GPT scheme although I get an error with the Windows installer along the lines of "we could not list or create a partition on your drive."

I am unsure what I should do but I am trying to achieve a working 3TB partiton that has all my cloned files. I still have my old HDD if that is needed. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Colif]

you are correct in thinking you need to reinstall win 10 as though you converted drive to gpt it still has the mbr boot system set up. I think PC recognises the drive as GPT but the boot folder is set up for MBR... if PC recognises the GPT format it would be looking for a specific file name that won't be on an MBR disc

remove old hdd from PC
boot from installer, on 2nd screen after languages, choose repair this pc, not install
choose troubleshoot
choose advanced
choose command prompt
follow this from step 3 to 7: http://www.windowscentral.com/how-clean-and-format-storage-drive-using-diskpart-windows-10
that will wipe disc. run the installer and see if it lets you install win 10 now.

Once win 10 boots off the hdd, turn power off on PC, unplug it and reattach old hdd
check boot order so old drive isn't in it

you can copy steam folders over from drive to drive and use the steam client to point the library location at the folder and it will find games without need to download them again. Copy your other files over as well.

 

[ArtPog]

The problem you've run into has been a distressing one unfortunately affecting many users. The disk-cloning program (at least all the d-c programs we've worked with) will also clone the partitioning-scheme of the source drive to the destination drive along with the data contents of the source drive.

So even though you may have GPT-partitioned your 3 TB destination drive, if the source drive, i.e., your 1 TB HDD is MBR-partitioned, the resultant clone on the 3 TB drive will be MBR-partitioned.

While partition managment programs, e.g, the AOMEI one, generally have no problem converting a non-OS data disk from MBR to GPT, they will at times balk at converting an MBR-partitioned drive that contains an OS to GPT. That has been our experience with a number of these third-party partition management programs. We have not found a reliable program to accomplish this type of desired conversion process.

However, based upon recent experience we've had with the AOMEI Partition Assistance Pro program Version 6.1 it looks like we might have found a solution to this problem (see below). We're assuming the non-Pro version of this software program would perform identically. Note these are the commercial versions of the AOMEI partition management programs. I don't believe the free/trial versions of that software have this MBR - GPT conversion capability. I assume that's the version you employed.

Our experience (to date) has been with the Win 10 OS; we haven't had occasion to work with this process with Win 7/8.1 systems. And we assume other commercial partition management programs would work along the lines we're describing.

So you're in a bind. If your programs and other non-OS data contents resided on a separate partition of the 1 TB MBR-partitioned source drive, you could create two partitions on the 3 TB GPT-partitioned drive, then fresh-install the Win 10 OS on that first partition and clone the contents of the second partition (containing the non-OS data contents) on the source drive to the second partition of the 3 TB destination drive.


You could, of course, fresh-install the Win 10 OS onto one partition of your 3 TB HDD which has been GPT-partitioned and create a second partition on that disk to contain the cloned non-OS data contents from your current 1 TB boot drive, i.e. your programs, audio-visual files, personal data, etc.. I realize it's an awkward situation but I haven't found any other reasonably simple & straightforward operation.

Anyway, we seemed to finally have found a solution to this dilemma using the AOMEI program I mentioned above.

The "trick" seems to be that following the apparently successful disk-cloning operation do NOT immediately attempt to use the partition management program to convert the (now) MBR-partitioned disk clone. Rather, boot to the cloned disk (after shutting down the PC - and hopefully disconnecting the source disk if feasible) and then utilize the partition manaagement program to undertake the MBR-to-GPT conversion process following the successful boot.

 

[ArtPog]

Got your private message but I'm unsure if I properly answered it. Did I?