Problems Cloning HD to SSD

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Remolten

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Dec 3, 2015
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Hello all, this past week I have been trying without avail to clone my larger 640GB laptop hard drive to my new 256GB SSD I'm installing in my laptop. I'll detail the process I have been using and the steps I have tried to get it to work with. Also, the original hard drive works fine, I just cannot get the clone to boot.

1. Clone HD to external 1TB drive with Clonezilla (ntfs method)
2. Boot into Ubuntu Live and shrink partitions to fit on 256GB SSD
3. Clone external drive to SSD with Clonezilla (dd and skip drive size checking)
4. The clone is successful, but the laptop says Boot System not Found when I turn it on

I have tried this process 3 times. When I examine the SSD under Ubuntu Live, it appears that it was cloned correctly. I have tried running a Startup Repair Disc (btw trying to clone Windows 7). However, when it first boots, and asks to choose an operating system, mine is not even detected. I have also tried various methods to fix the MBR (boot-repair, manual dd etc).

Does anyone have any other suggestions on how to get this working? Obviously, I'm guessing many of you are going to say that the SSD is broken, but I have tested it on a different computer and it is fully functional. I appreciate any responses to help fix my problem.
 
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When I bought an SSD a couple months ago to clone my system to, I used the software Macrium Reflect and it worked perfectly fine. It shrinks the partitions automatically so that they will fit on to your SSD as long as the total usage of your HDD does not exceed the partitioned space that will be cloned on to your SSD (it will usually be a little less than the full capacity, 256GB in your case), but I assume you have already accounted for that. Just make sure you don't configure it to clone your main partition last, because it may result in a severely undersized main partition that you will have to sort out through other means which can be a pain. Check all the resulting sizes of the cloned partitions before you start cloning.
 
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Hello rollingbarrels, I actually resized all of the partitions beforehand, so that they would all be cloned. And after my inspection under Ubuntu, it appears that it cloned properly. Unfortunately, I still cannot get the SSD to boot.
 
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I do not have much experience in cloning. I have only done it once which was the instance that I mentioned in my last post and it worked successfully, so I thought I would share the method I used hoping that it might be able to help in some way. I do not have any quick fixes for a cloned SSD that will not boot. I would just wipe the drive and start again.
 
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I have thoroughly checked the BIOS settings, and there is not a way to change it. The computer is an HP m6 1035dx. I have actually booted the SSD before with Ubuntu, so it should be functional.
 
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I have had this issue myself, it turns out when i cloned the drive with clonezilla it damaged the system partition.
If you have damaged the windows 7 "system partition" (about ~500MB to 1GB something like that) this stops it being detected by startup repair an other boot repair utilities. It might be worth trying to see if repairing that partition works.
 
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How would I go about attempting to repair that partition?

 
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How would I go about attempting to repair that partition?
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In a partition manager make sure the 'system partition' is marked as primary and marked active.
When I had issues it was because the partition was not marked active. After that you should just be able to run the windows 7 startup repair from a recovery disk it takes a few reboots (about three?) into startup repair for it to fix it, each time it should fix something new. iirc the first reboot gets windows recovery to see the partition/windows instillation and should move/fix the system partition and other bits of it.
This should at least get things detecting windows 7 properly. Repairing the mbr should happen through the startup recovery too after it can see the windows 7 install on the disk.
Hopefully if everything goes okay it should boot.
Good luck
 
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I have already done that before, setting the system partition with the boot flag via GParted in Ubuntu. Is that different than making it the active partition? If so, what did you use to mark it as active?
 
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Setting a partition to active is a way of telling the bios or other programs where the main operating system bootloader is on a drive. Only one partition on each hard drive can be set as an active partition or bootable partition. I used the "gparted" linux distro to set the partition active, after that the windows repair was able to fully reconstruct the system partition from a 500MB partition at the start of the disk
 
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