Question SSD posts to black screen with cursor

[Toddie86]

I apologise if this has been answered elsewhere but every answer I've seen so far doesn't help my situation.

I have a 500gb Samsung M.2 drive installed in one slot on my motherboard.

In the second slot I have just added a crucial 2tb M.2 drive. I want to migrate the windows install over to the larger drive so I can then swap the smaller drive for another 2tb one.

I've been able to clone the drive successfully but when I switch the boot drive to the new 2tb one I just get a black screen with cursor.

When looking into this there are suggests to reboot the graphics driver or that my new drive needs to be assigned to C:

Only I can't do that if I can't boot to windows and if I boot off the smaller ssd it's obviously already using the C: as that's its name.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I've been able to clone the drive successfully but when I switch the boot drive to the new 2tb one I just get a black screen with cursor.
Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

After cloning is done, old drive has to be physically disconnected.
This step is not optional.
If you fail to do this and boot from cloned drive with clone source drive still connected,
then cloned drive gets messed up and you have to redo cloning.

It is related to drive letter assignment. If old drive is present it reserves drive letter C:.
New drive can not assign letter C: for itself, because it is already used up.
And windows can not recover from this situation. It starts massive registry updates and
basically commits suicide.

 

[Toddie86]

Thanks, I'll try that. I did try rebooting without the original drive but I tried leaving it in first so that might be the issue.

I'll post back here with how I get on.

 

[Toddie86]

After cloning is done, old drive has to be physically disconnected.
This step is not optional.
If you fail to do this and boot from cloned drive with clone source drive still connected,
then cloned drive gets messed up and you have to redo cloning.

It is related to drive letter assignment. If old drive is present it reserves drive letter C:.
New drive can not assign letter C: for itself, because it is already used up.
And windows can not recover from this situation. It starts massive registry updates and
basically commits suicide.

Thank you, that worked perfectly and makes total sense!

Coinsidentally does that mean if I ever put the old drive back in will if still affect the larger drive or is it just an issue on the first reboot?

 

[SkyNetRising]

does that mean if I ever put the old drive back in will if still affect the larger drive or is it just an issue on the first reboot?

It is first boot issue from cloned drive.
After you have sucessfully done first boot from cloned drive,
you can reconnect old drive and clean/repartition/reformat it.