I cloned a hard drive and when I try to boot up the cloned hard drive it gets a boot error and wont start?

Question

I cloned a hard drive and when I try to boot up the cloned hard drive it gets a boot error and wont start?

Answer 1

When you cloned the drive, did you copy the entire drive or just a specific partition?



If it is a GPT drive with EFI bootstrap, then you need to clone the actual operating system partition, and for Windows, you also need to clone the EFI and MSR partitions.



If it is an MBR drive, as well as the actual partitions, you need to clone the boot code buried in the MBR and you will probably have to clone the remaining sectors in the first track which often contain further bootstrap information. In addition, the start sector addresses for each partition probably have to be correct.



When I clone an MBR disk I use the Linux dd command to copy the entire disk. The target disk for the clone has to be the same size of larger.



With GPT, cloning using Linux dd works if the target disk is the same size, but there will be a disk size error if the target is a different size.



In both cases, if the target disk is smaller then a dd clone will truncate the copy losing sectors that were at the end of the source disk.



Good cloning software can often manage these problems.



When asking a question like this it is often helpful if you explained just what you did rather than simply say you cloned the drive. Obviously you did not clone the drive but probably only cloned parts of the drive.



Finally, if you have the clone and the original installed in the computer at the same time, the operating system may object to having two apparently identical drives. If the new drive is on a different disk interface connection, you might have to amend the boot parameters in the BIOS/UEFI firmware to use the different interface.

Answer 2

try the clone again but this time choose the option to set it as the boot drive

Answer 3

Usually the new cloned drive is not formatted as a boot drive.

Has to do with the master boot record for the drive.

You can fix this with special software that does absolute reads and writs to a drive sectors, but they can also be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing.

Answer 4

If this is an MBR-partitioned disk and you didn't copy the boot sector, that is exactly what you would expect to happen. If this is a GPT-partitioned disk and you didn't clone the EFI partition, that is also what would be expected to happen.