Cloning partitions. Wont boot. Help!?

[FwdMoparJunkie]

I'm working on a friends pc and I'm installing a new hard drive. I noticed that he has dual boot of the same os on one hard drive. Probably by mistake but, he has files inside windows directory on both partitions! I don't want to erase these partitions so, I took another hard drive of my own and used EaseUS partition master. I copied each individual partition to essentially use for backup. I want to 100% duplicate his dual boot hard drive for safe measures.

I can't get it boot any of the two partitions. When entering the bios I select f8 and use the hard druve that i cloned and i only get a blinking (-) with no error. it doesn't say missing boot mgr or anything. How do I get it to boot into windows?

I tried selecting each partition to active but, that didn't work either. Here's a screenshot of the partition table. http://i686.photobucket.com/albums/vv225/Full_Throttle/partition%20table.png

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, FwdMoparJunkie!

I'm sorry about the question but are you installing a secondary drive or is this your HDD on the screenshot?
Good thing that you backed up the files by creating a duplicate of his drive.
I guess the fresh re-install of the OS would solve everything, since it will reformat the drive completely. As long as you have an accessible backup of his files somewhere else. Just make sure when re-install, to leave only one HDD plugged in the SATA ports, otherwise an OS confusion might occur which might result in booting issues later on.

Let me know how it goes! Hope I was helpful!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[FwdMoparJunkie]

My intentions were to install a secondary disk (wd black) and to clone his original disk over to the wd black but, when I got his pc, I realized he had unnecessary partitions on his original. I was thinknig about just merging/deleting the partition but, decided against it for there may be errors later on down the road. I decided that it would be best to just start with a clean os and just copy all of his docs, movies etc. over to it. However, I still wanted to clone his original bootable partitioned drive to one of my own for safe keeping. Then format his old bootable drive for his main storage drive without an os.

I used windows easy transfer with an internal wd black (my own) and I believe it took 20hrs to transfer 450gb!!? I will never use that ever again. I understand that easy transfer transfers windows specific settings but, it's not worth the slow transfer. Any recommendations on a third party software that does the same thing as easy transfer? I hear that windows easy transfer transfers over too much junk so, I'll just create a restore point before I transfer it over. Just in case it sucks.

As far as EaseUS goes, it works and has awesome partition settings but, I found that Acronis works better for me. I havn't tried booting the cloned partitioned drive yet but, I don't think I'll have any issues.

Good thing that I have a recent clean windows os image with all of the updates. Saves me so much time

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hi again, FwdMoparJunkie!

Well, yes, there are a lot of cloning software utilities out there but I'd suggest you to use Acronis True Image WD Edition Software, since you are cloning to the WD Black. It will let you manually select whatever data you wish to transfer and, in my experience, it's a lot faster than Easy Transfer. Here's a link to the utility: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=RN8xjr
BTW, good job on the system image, it surely saves time.
However, if you are in possession of the OS installation media, it's recommended to do a fresh clean install instead.

Hope this helps! Let me know how it goes, once you are done!
SuperSoph_WD