Recovery/Repair bootable drive

[connjunction]

Well, have this Dell Inspirion 17R that came with a 1TB HHD. Upgraded last year to a 250 GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO. Now running out of room and want to upgrade to a 500 GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO. Did the clone and installed the new SSD. Message says something wrong with the OS (Windows 8.1). Following Microsoft website on creating a recovery drive, i find that my old SSD does not have the recovery on it.

NOW WHAT???? I need to get this new SSD installed as my capacity on the old SSD is about to be gone.

UPDATE: Followed Samsung directions to the letter. When finished, newly cloned Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB drive has not got two drive designations of F & E. Cannot change the drive designation since the computer cannot read the OS when I installed it. I am trying to figure out what to do. Can someone help?

 

[Ck1_13]

Cloned drives should boot exactly like the old ones, hmm.. Just a thought, did you think of just adding the new ssd drive in as another drive, instead of a boot drive cloned?

Anyways, samsung simply partitioned the new drive into 'one' drive, instead of two, which is why only 1 drive letter, you can fix this by repartitioning the drive and re-cloning it, or obtain a 3rd party program like 'partition magic' (i'm not sure what people use nowadays, but this used to be a good one)

Now, for your actual problem, when windows starts can you give the exact error it states may help fix it. Generic tips include are you able to boot into safe mode by chance? If so this is definitely fixable. If you can't get safe mode to boot, and have no recovery disk, there really isn't much you can do but put the old drive back in. Anyone else got any ideas?