I have a unique cloning issue

[louieb62]

I cloned my OS to a new SSD drive. All went well booted fine. But I noticed in disk management that I forgot to choose the flag to use the entire disk space as I was going from a 256 to a 500 gb. So I did it again the right way, but I didn't reformat the drive, because I couldn't see a way to do it in disk management. Now my bios doesn't see the drive. First I thought cable. But I hooked up another drive and the bios saw it. Then I thought drive so I put it in another laptop and the bios saw the drive, but wouldn't boot. Why is my new computer bios not seeing the drive. I'd use smart check but there is no option in my bios. Any idea? I'm soon ready to replace the drive.

Acer Predator Helios 300

 

[Barty1884]

What did you clone? Did you ensure you cloned all partitions etc? If you didn't take the boot partition too, there's no instruction for the drive to be bootable.

FWIW, after you cloned, you could've just expanded the partition within Windows to use the full 500GB - opposed to re-cloning.

 

[louieb62]

I cloned windows 10 with all partitions. An exact copy and it booted perfectly. I didn't know I could resize it as it was showing only half the drive available. The same size as the source drive. Too late for that now. What as part of the recloning would make the bios not see it?

 

[FireWire2]

That is what clone function does "An exact copy". Use DiskPart clean up the new drive, Redo what you did in the 1st attempted (which is correct)
Remove the drive reboot with old HDD, hot plug the newly cloned (remember to enable hotplug feature in the BIOS) in the system, then use Disk Manager to expand the remaining space. That is it

 

[Barty1884]

An exact copy of the selected partitions. I suspect, perhaps, you didn't take all partitions on the second attempt.

I'd wipe & start over with the clone, doing exactly what you did the first time around.

As for hotplug, there's absolutely no need for that? Just having it connected from the outset should be fine. I believe you can expand the volume/partition of a boot drive (so you could boot to the SSD initially), but I would recommend booting from the HDD and expanding the partition of the secondary (SSD) drive. Then reboot & boot onto the SSD.

You *should* be able to expand the partition simply enough from Disk Management, but it'll depend how the partitions have been placed on the drive. This is not always perfect. IF the "free" space is to the left of the partitions, or there's a smaller partition (not the main C) between the C drive and the free space, Windows won't let you expand like that.

In those instances, there are lots of freeware options available. I've had success with EaseUS.
https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/merge-partitions-freeware.html

You can restructure/reorder the partitions, to allow the extend/merge functionality & get access to the full 500GB (or as close to, once Windows does it's thing).

 

[louieb62]

All good ideas except the SSD no longer appears in bios or disk management, it's gone. I verified the drive in another laptop. It wouldn't boot, but bios saw it, and with a live Linux disc I could see the contents, I could mount the drive. And I verified the cable by connecting a different drive. Something is preventing my new computer from recognizing the new SSD, but only after my erroneous recloning. Regardless of what I did, shouldn't it still show up?