Question Copied boot drive to another drive and now my pc wont even post

[RCguitarist]

I copied my boot drive (C) to another drive in my system and now my pc wont even post.

Here is what happened/the details:
Have 3 drives: main boot/windows drive, games storage drive, and a music drive. I installed a new bigger drive for the games drive and copied everything over, this went perfect. Then i formatted and unallocated the old games drive. From there my plan was to copy the main boot/ windows drive (256GB) over to the old games drive (2TB) and would use that old games drive as my new boot/windows drive. Everything worked fine at this point. The newly installed drive was working and i even fired up a few games on it to test it. Worked great.

Then i told Minitool Partition Wizard Pro to make a copy of the entire boot drive on the old games drive. I didnt tell it to change drive letters or anything yet, just to make the copy. It started the copy process and said it needed to shut down windows to be able to copy it all. I let it run in a shutdown but not shutdown state for 4 hours but it never seemed to finish. I pushed the power button and it shut down my pc.

Now when i turn on the pc it wont even post so i cant get to the bios. My motherboard gives me no error led lights. When i unplug the original boot drive i do get the error led light of no boot drive detected, so it is detecting my original boot drive as the boot drive. I tried unplugging both the original boot drive and the drive with the new copy on it and still it would not even post. Not sure what to do here. Any ideas as to why it wont even go to the bios post screen?

 

[USAFRet]

There are specific steps and tools to migrate from one drive to another.
But do it incorrectly, and you can end up with a major problem.

What drives, what motherboard, what OS?

If you return the system back to original working config, does it boot up?

 

[RCguitarist]

There are specific steps and tools to migrate from one drive to another.
But do it incorrectly, and you can end up with a major problem.

What drives, what motherboard, what OS?

If you return the system back to original working config, does it boot up?

I was using Minitool Partition Wizard Pro to do the clone of the drive.
Motherboard is an MSI Z690-A
OS is Windows 10
Drives are:
Original boot drive: 256GB SATA SSD crucial mx100

Old games drive (want as new boot drive): 2TB SATA SSD crucial mx300

Music drive(left unchanged): 1TB NVMe WD SN550

New games drive(tested and work great): 4TB NVMe WD SN850x

 

[RCguitarist]

I was using Minitool Partition Wizard Pro to do the clone of the drive.
Motherboard is an MSI Z690-A
OS is Windows 10
Drives are:
Original boot drive: 256GB SATA SSD crucial mx100

Old games drive (want as new boot drive): 2TB SATA SSD crucial mx300

Music drive(left unchanged): 1TB NVMe WD SN550

New games drive(tested and work great): 4TB NVMe WD SN850x

UPDATE: After letting it sit for a while and unplugging my 2nd monitor, i got it to post and got in the bios. It had apparently set my drive with the windows copy as the main boot drive. I guess the copy wasnt successful. So now i am into windows, but i am not sure about how to go about safely copying over my boot drive to the bigger old games drive. Any ideas?

 

[USAFRet]

UPDATE: After letting it sit for a while and unplugging my 2nd monitor, i got it to post and got in the bios. It had apparently set my drive with the windows copy as the main boot drive. I guess the copy wasnt successful. So now i am into windows, but i am not sure about how to go about safely copying over my boot drive to the bigger old games drive. Any ideas?

So the system works, 100% ?

Please show us a screencap of your current Disk Management window.

Cloning is easy, if you do it right.

 

[RCguitarist]

So the system works, 100% ?

Please show us a screencap of your current Disk Management window.

Cloning is easy, if you do it right.

Yes, everything works 100% as it did before. Here is a screencap:

Disk 1 is where i want to be the boot/c drive, disk 2 is the current boot/c drive

 

[USAFRet]

Your screencap is too small.
And I meant a picture of Disk Management. Not whatever that is.

 

[RCguitarist]

Thank you for your help. Your comments got me looking into other migration software and I came to find out that Minitool's software just sucks and did a bad disk copy. I used the free trial of Macrium Reflect and everything went smoothly and it got the job done in about 15 minutes.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I came to find out that Minitool's software just sucks and did a bad disk copy.

It doesn't. It's very good actually.
Might be too advanced for inexperienced users though.

 

[RCguitarist]

It doesn't. It's very good actually.
Might be too advanced for inexperienced users though.

Lol. Sure sure. Didnt know there were minitool fanboys.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Didnt know there were minitool fanboys.

Well - it has never failed me on any partition management operations.
But it certainly requires basic understanding, how boot process works.
It will not guide your hand and will not tell, if you're doing something wrong.

Not sure, if that makes me a fanboy.

 

[USAFRet]

Some people say the same about Macrium. "Too complex!!!"

I'd prob have no issue with Minitool. Just gotta be smarter than the tool, and read the directions.

 

[zlot2v2]

there is a problem of boot since windows boot rule became more and more complex, 20years ago we had MBR only, 10years ago we had uesd to MBR and GPT ，after fews years, came ahci 10G then nvme, these, all add news rules to window boot invieroment.
on Z370 Gigebytes, i have 3 m2 slots, and i filled them all with ssd, and i can boot windows on any m2 slot
on Z690 ASAU I have 4 M2 slots, and i filled them all with ssd, but i can boot only one slot near CPU
usually i like install windows in 2 drivers in order to comparing and problem finding, but now dual system on deferent drivers is not eazy, i have to get use to only one system
all i said above is to illustrate that our boot system is becaming more and more complex
at present, moving windows from driver A to driver B，is easy to move but maybe hard to boot, you should conside verious things about bios setup, slot, formates,any conflicts...
so we make it easy, we dont sovle problem, we just archiver your needs--moving sys from old driver to another driver
preparations (dont ask why)
1 formate you destination driver then close windows
2 power off and unslot other drivers which is not relative to system moving if you have more drivers
3 restart windows to make your system recongnize that there is only two dirver,that one is system driver anothe is driver just only formated
4 clone or moving(not copy) or make windows7 mode recovery image and make new system driver
5 power off and remove old system driver from Mainboard only leave one driver
6 for sata3 dirver there is nothing to do just wait to restar, for nvme, you had better move it to the slot near cpu
7 restart pc if it has any trouble on boot please check bios CSM state and change it, also intel storage XXXX try to swith it on/off, also close VMD
PS if you juest move windows between drivers which are same rules such as nvme to nvme ，then，it will not related to any bios setup operatinon