Windows 10 wont boot from cloned 4TB HDD

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BEJR2000

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Dec 8, 2014
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Originally my PC only had a 500 GB HDD. I cloned windows and a couple of games to a 256 GB SSD via Macrium Reflect which booted windows and worked fine. Now I want to upgrade the 500 GB HDD to a 4TB HDD with windows as a backup just in case my SSD fails. I used Macrium Reflect again to clone the 500 GB HDD to the 4TB HDD. The 4TB HDD was resized to the exact same size as the 500 GB HDD under MBR format. When booting from the new cloned 4TB resized to 500 GB HDD it requests me to insert the windows 10 disk which I don't have because it didn't come with my PC. Now I did some research and found out that you need UEFI bios in order to boot windows from a 4TB HDD. I tried updating to "U1D(UEFI BIOS)" from "F9" bios from my motherboards web sight and I get a "Bios Id Check Error". Mind you I have successfully updated the motherboards BIOS before but I didn't update to the latest BIOS due to it being a beta BIOS and not supporting some of my GIGABYTE utilities. My motherboard is advertised as supporting "3TB+ (terabyte) hard drive booting without the need for partitioning, and enables more data storage on a single hard drive".

**PC SPECS**

Processor: Intel Core i7-2600k

Graphics: GTX 1060 MSI Gaming X 6G Edition

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD3-B3

Motherboard BIOS Version: F9

Ram: 16GB DDR3

Primary HDD: HyperX Savage 240GB SSD

Old secondary HDD: Seagate ST500DM002 500GB

New secondary HDD: Seagate 4TB IronWolf (ST4000VN008)

Power supply: AX860 860 watt 80 plus platinum Certified Fully Modular PSU

Software: Windows 10
 
Solution
USAFRet
There are much better ways of using Macrium to protect your Windows install other than a full clone on that 4TB drive.

Use it for Imaging. Full and Incremental/Differential.
Designate a folder on the 4TB as a target for the images.
Set Macrium on a schedule, however you see fit.
When/if the 250GB SSD dies, or major virus infection, or whatever....you simply boot from the Macrium Rescue USB or CD you've made, tell it which Image to use, and which drive (not the 4TB) to apply it to.

On my system, I have a 500GB SSD boot drive.
The 500GB is currently 205GB consumed.
I keep a Full image, and 14 days of Incrementals.
That amount of backup images consumes ~180GB. (Macrium does a little compression, and leaves off temp files...
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There are much better ways of using Macrium to protect your Windows install other than a full clone on that 4TB drive.

Use it for Imaging. Full and Incremental/Differential.
Designate a folder on the 4TB as a target for the images.
Set Macrium on a schedule, however you see fit.
When/if the 250GB SSD dies, or major virus infection, or whatever....you simply boot from the Macrium Rescue USB or CD you've made, tell it which Image to use, and which drive (not the 4TB) to apply it to.

On my system, I have a 500GB SSD boot drive.
The 500GB is currently 205GB consumed.
I keep a Full image, and 14 days of Incrementals.
That amount of backup images consumes ~180GB. (Macrium does a little compression, and leaves off temp files, pagefile, etc)

I still have full use of the entire rest of the drive that image collection lives on. And I can recreate the system as it was on any day in the last two weeks.
To recover might take a whole 20 minutes.

For most people, a full clone on a second drive is a waste of space, and not an effective backup scenario.
 
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Solution
Honestly. If you are just looking for an image backup there are tons of ways to do it better then cloning your drive all the time.

I would recommend Veeam Agent for Windows. It is completely free and the best free product I've used yet. I use it for backing up all my systems at home, including servers.

And you can use that 4TB as your backup source. It will do image based backups and allow you to create a restore CD in the event you cant boot your OS, it includes drivers and OS key etc... everything you need to get your system back to its original state and even allows for dissimilar hardware restores.
 
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1. First of all, while the following doesn't address your issue, just let me mention that first of all you're dealing with a very old MB given the scheme of things. It was a dog of a MB when it was released some six or seven years ago but apparently subsequent BIOS updates resolved a lot of its issues.

Your current CPU is practically a classic as CPUs go. While it's quite inferior in performance to today's models it does its job reasonably well and I have the impression most current users are satisfied with it.

I would assume you're a gamer so your current system suits you OK.

I say all this because you're working with a decent SSD as your boot drive and would hope you could consider upgrading your system at least with some modestly-priced MB that could accommodate your DDR3 RAM and current CPU. Anyway...just a thought.

2. There should be no problem cloning the contents of the 500 GB HDD to a 4 TB HDD using the Macrium Reflect program. Since (I assume) the 500 GB HDD is MBR-partitioned that partitioning scheme will be cloned over to the 4 TB HDD regardless of whether the 4 TB HDD has been GPT-partitioned at the time of the disk-cloning operation. A "clone is a clone is a clone". Capiche?

3. So, as a consequence, only 2 TB of disk-space can be utilized on that 4 TB HDD "destination" drive. A problem arises in converting the 4 TB HDD to a GPT-partitioned disk. Even if that drive is connected as a secondary drive in the system a third-party partition management program will balk at the conversion process because it detects an OS on the drive. Because it does, it will refuse to convert the drive to GPT. (At least - UNTIL NOW - we haven't found a reliable program that will accomplish that conversion.)

4. Fortunately, Windows 10 (containing the latest revision - "Windows Creator" update - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
includes a conversion process from MBR to GPT. It's the "MBR2GPT" file. It works just fine when the drive is connected as the boot drive - not as a secondary drive in our experience. Simple to use so do a Google search on "using Windows 10 MBR2GPT" for detailed description & instructions (assuming you're interested).

5. I'm unsure if the above is responsive to all your questions.
 
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It does matter... sector size is a big deal... So if it attempts to clone a MBR 512k sector to a MBR 4k sector... it wont boot..

Sector sizes are not something you can change. You can change a logical sector size but the physical sector size is not changable. It will cause this types of issues all day long.

I'm a network\systems engineer and went into a big deal at Microsoft for this, because we were unable to use Windows Server Backup with 4k sector drives. It is still an issue to this day.

So yes, while a "clone is a clone" it is a clone on an none compatible drive. It's like cloning from a hard drive to an 80s tape.... it has a clone copy on the tape. Great. Now try boot from it....
 
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That just allows 32x systems to use larger drives... it wont fix the backup sector issue...

"Enables 32bit Systems without Hybrid EFI Technology to Utilize Unallocated Space on New 3TB+ HDDs"

Says it right there on the page.

All that does it change the logical sector format so x32 systems can read it. Something x64 systems already do with emulation.
 
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All I can tell you is that we have successfully cloned drives with the source & destination drive containing different sector sizes. Now I must admit that I can't be certain there wouldn't be a problem with the Macrium Reflect disk-cloning program that the user is apparently working with. It's ordinarily not the d-c program we use, which is the Casper program. However, the Casper program is a commercial one costing $49.99 and most users are loathe to purchase a type of program they can freely obtain on the net. In any event, he/she can give it a try. If it works - swell; if not - so be it.
 
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A lot comes into play with this. Some backup programs can try to fake it logically with emulation to force a different sector size. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It also depends on the system OS he is using. Newer BIO's can also support booting from GPT, however, not all can. For the longest time you couldn't even boot from a GPT disk...

But yes I agree he could try another software. I use Acronis True Image on an enterprise level and that seems to have worked so far.

However, I would bet that if he was to use a 2TB or under drive. His cloned disk would boot up with issues right away and unless he does that test. There is no way to know for sure.

However, sectors do matter in the larger scale of things. Hardware compatibility in important to take note of and not just brush away to the side because "a clone is a clone".
 
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I honestly am loathe to prolong this "thread" within this post since I really believe it has little bearing or impact on the poster's query. I suspect his/her brain is already spinning.

I'll just make a final comment as follows...we've been cloning hundreds (if not thousands of drives of one type or another) over a period of some 20 years or so, using a variety of disk-cloning programs. During the past ten years or so we use nearly exclusively the Casper program I mentioned as our chief comprehensive backup program for our and others' PC systems. We have never run into the sector-type problem you have mentioned with Casper or with any of the other disk-cloning programs we sometimes have occasion to employ. So all I can relate is my personal experience with this issue...nothing more.
 
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Have ran into this issue quite a few times. Especially over the last 2-3 years where 4k sectors have started becoming the norm.

So to suggest that 4k sectors could be a root cause of the issue is not so far fetched of an idea. A simple google search will shows 1000s of threads with people that have this exact issue.

To suggest this as a possible issue is simply part of troubleshooting. It has happened and it will continue to happen until software companies find ways to program for the 4k sectors. Which they already started doing with emulation. However, that doesn't always work.

It can very well be his software is unable to handle the sector sizes. It is possible his system can't boot from those sectors. It is possible there was an issue with his clone all together.

However, this is part of troubleshooting.
 
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that is so unnecessary. clearly you already have the storage to backup all your files so just do a fresh install of windows in UEFI mode on the SSD and then once you have it all setup the way you want it create an image on the 4TB HDD you can restore from

 
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Like I said. Doing a clone as a backup is a terrible idea. It takes hours to clone a disk and over time that data will get stale and you will have to reclone it over and over to keep it up-to-date.

Use the 4TB as a storage backup source and use a free program like Veeam Agent for Windows to backup an image to your 4TB drive.... You can buy another 500gb or whatever size you want as a standby disk. When your internal goes bad, take the image backup from the 4TB and restore it onto your 500gb standby disk, swap out the drives and you are good to know.

It is so much better then having to reclone a disk every few weeks... it is also automatic, you can create backup schedules etc...
 
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