Sam 840 evo to 850 Evo clone double fail. Need help.

[promograbber]

I'll try to make this as short as I can.

• 
  Win 8.1
  Source Drive: Samsung 840 Evo 500GB
  Target Drive: Samsung 850 Evo 1TB

I attempted to clone the 840 to the 850 thrice.

The first attempt was with Samsung Data Migration. Cloned in four hours over USB 3.0 to the 850 using the USB to Sata adapter that was included with 840 drive because the 850 was packaged with no extras. The clone was performed in OS. The 850 failed to boot because of a problem with the boot parameters.

Attempts two and three were with Macrium Reflect Home Free. Attempt two was in OS and attempt three was from Macrium's bootable WinPE on a USB 3.0 drive. Both failed an intelligent clone because the file system could not be verified.

I've determined at this point that I need to perform this clone from a bootable USB in order to ensure the clone is complete and accurate and that I need to use a clone software that can operate from the bootable USB.

This is where I'm at a lose. I've been looking through search results and I can't find one straight forward answer on a software solution. Does anyone have a recommendation for either a total solution cloning program or a bootable OS/clone program pairing that would accomplish this? Thank you in advance for any help.

 

[Suztera]

Could you clone through SATA rather than USB?
Also with your first clone, what error showed up?
Boot manager is missing?
You just need to have a Window 8.1 installer and use that to repair your boot manager.

 

[promograbber]

Could you clone through SATA rather than USB?
Also with your first clone, what error showed up?
Boot manager is missing?
You just need to have a Window 8.1 installer and use that to repair your boot manager.

I'm actually out of available SATA connectors on my board. I'm running multiple slave HDD's for cataloged data storage.

After connecting the 850, I received a message at where the post screen normally would be stating there was a problem with that boot parameters and that it might be due to changes in the hardware. I believe it was from the mainboard. I'm running an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0

Do you mean the boot manager on the SSD or in the BIOS? I was able to access the bios and set the primary bootable drive to the 850, but I still recieved the boot error.

 

[Suztera]

Could you clone through SATA rather than USB?
Also with your first clone, what error showed up?
Boot manager is missing?
You just need to have a Window 8.1 installer and use that to repair your boot manager.

I'm actually out of available SATA connectors on my board. I'm running multiple slave HDD's for cataloged data storage.

After connecting the 850, I received a message at where the post screen normally would be stating there was a problem with that boot parameters and that it might be due to changes in the hardware. I believe it was from the mainboard. I'm running an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0

Do you mean the boot manager on the SSD or in the BIOS? I was able to access the bios and set the primary bootable drive to the 850, but I still recieved the boot error.

Boot manager on the SSD. I recently cloned a HDD to an 840 Pro. When removing the HDD, the boot manager was not changed since you just cloned the data on the HDD. Just use the Window Recovery tools and run System repair and it should fix it. You may need to run it two or more times to get it fixed.
https://neosmart.net/wiki/recovering-windows-bootloader/

 

[promograbber]

Could you clone through SATA rather than USB?
Also with your first clone, what error showed up?
Boot manager is missing?
You just need to have a Window 8.1 installer and use that to repair your boot manager.

I'm actually out of available SATA connectors on my board. I'm running multiple slave HDD's for cataloged data storage.

After connecting the 850, I received a message at where the post screen normally would be stating there was a problem with that boot parameters and that it might be due to changes in the hardware. I believe it was from the mainboard. I'm running an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0

Do you mean the boot manager on the SSD or in the BIOS? I was able to access the bios and set the primary bootable drive to the 850, but I still recieved the boot error.

Boot manager on the SSD. I recently cloned a HDD to an 840 Pro. When removing the HDD, the boot manager was not changed since you just cloned the data on the HDD. Just use the Window Recovery tools and run System repair and it should fix it. You may need to run it two or more times to get it fixed.
https://neosmart.net/wiki/recovering-windows-bootloader/

I'll give it a try and get back to you. May be a day or two. Thank you for your help this far. ^_^

 

[promograbber]

I tried the boot manager fix last night and it didn't work. the system repair was unable to find anything to repair. I'm back to square one again.

 

[BadAsAl]

I did something similar just the other day. I used a bootable Clonezilla CD and a 240 GB Crucial SSD as the source and a 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO as the destination. When I put the EVO back into the PC that the Crucial came out of I had all kinds of problems booting. Auto repair did not work. I even put the Crucial back in and same thing! I was frustrated and decided to fresh install on the EVO and then transfer everything. I had 2 other drives in my PC on SATA ports so I unplugged those as I don't like to have other drives connected when I install an OS. I tried booting just for the heck of it and what do you know, booted in 10 seconds perfectly. Restarted and again no issues. Plugged in each drive in turn and it stopped booting when I plugged the 2nd drive in. I swapped SATA cables around and now the other drive caused a no boot. Changed the SATA cable and all is well. So, my point is, try unplugging every other drive and even any USB drives and printers and try to boot only from the cloned drive and see what happens.

 

[promograbber]

I ended up caving and dealing with the problem the costly way. I paid the noob fee and purchased a copy of Acronis Migrate Easy 7 for $40 and used that. Disconnected all my slave HDDs hooked up the 850 Evo to the internal SATA like Suztera recommended, then Acronis rebooted the system and did a DOS boot clone of the drive. Took three attempted and I had to delete all the partitions on the 850 and leave it RAW, but it got it done. Thanks for all the help and sorry to take up everyone's time.

Edit: Clicked the wrong Answer button, but pretty much every post that wasn't mine is the solution.

 

[BadAsAl]

You can unpick mine and pick the better one, I don't mind

 

[promograbber]

umm... how? ;>_>

(is Tom nub)