Question New SSD can't find OS

[bigalfromwigan]

Well, I have decided to join the revolution and buy myself an SSD. However, I have followed the instructions to the letter. I have tried this twice now, with different software in case it was a problem there but no, I think it's more basic than that.

I have a PC with two operating systems on the one drive. I have XP and Windows 10. So I realised I have not used XP for over two years so it's no longer required. I cloned the system disc (Windows 10) onto my new SSD and the process seemed to work OK.

Here's the thing. I removed the original hard drive from the PC and put the new drive in but instead of booting, I get a message saying it can't find ntoskrnl.exe or it is corrupt. So I remove the drive and put it in another PC and check against the ntoskrnl.exe on that drive and a bit to bit comparison says there is nothing wrong with it.

Did searches all over the internet and all through this forum with no joy.

So I am opening up to your combined wisdom - how do I get over this issue?

 

[CountMike]

It's understandable if XP was at first BOOT sector because it doesn't recognize SSD.

 

[bigalfromwigan]

OK, I was not aware of this limitation to XP. So I guess my next question is - if I remove XP from the original drive, and expand the Windows 10 drive to fit the physical drive, how do I remove the original BOOT sector and replace it with one that Windows 10 can use, and then copy that drive to the SSD?

If that is not possible, could I copy the BOOT sector from another drive that has Windows 10 installed?

 

[fzabkar]

Is ntoskrnl.exe in the Win XP partition? I don't have any recent experience with dual booting, but ISTR that the boot process starts from your XP partition and then switches to Win 10 if selected.

 

[CountMike]

Is ntoskrnl.exe in the Win XP partition? I don't have any recent experience with dual booting, but ISTR that the boot process starts from your XP partition and then switches to Win 10 if selected.

To get it to boot to other partition it would have to boot to kernel at least (vestiges of DOS) and give you BOOT menu which you can't even see in this case.
This will need a clean W10 installation to get rid of XP which really doesn't belong to any computer that can run W10. It could be run in a Virtual machine though.

 

[SkyNetRising]

If that is not possible, could I copy the BOOT sector from another drive that has Windows 10 installed?

Can you show screenshot from Disk Management?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

With two versions of Windows on the same drive and you only wanting to keep one of them I'd say that's not a suitable situation for cloning.

If it was me I'd reformat all partitions on the SSD and then do a fresh install of Windows 10 on it.

 

[arif1752002m4a1]

Format SSD and simply install windows 10 on it.