Solved Clone from SATA to NVMe won't boot

I've cloned countless systems SATA to SATA and most of the time SATA to NVMe has worked if I remembered to enable the stornvme driver on boot, but I've been struggling the past few days with a fairly new HP laptop.

Original computer stopped booting due to failed GPU so I put the hard drive in a similar computer and upgraded from Win7 to Win10 and then Win11 when the Win10 clone wouldn't boot. I can boot the old hard drive via USB on the new laptop and installed all of the drivers so it sees the SSD that I want to clone it to.

Cloning with ddrescue and then booting the Win11 USB installer to rebuild the BCD (after manually loading the F6 driver every single time). I suspect the issue might be related to Intel RST failing to install. It loads something on the WinRE partition and never gives me an error but the program isn't there when I boot.

Besides most of my sanity, what am I missing?

@kahlil88,

Welcome to ElevenForum!

Try something slightly different. Rather than clone the SATA drive to the NVMe drive, try this instead:

1) Make a backup disk image copy of the SATA drive.

2) Restore that backup image to the NVMe drive.

OPTIONAL TEST BEFORE DOING THE ABOVE

I would suggest doing the following test before you backup and restore the C: drive as noted above:

1) Create a Windows boot disk (USB Flash Drive, DVD, etc.).

2) Boot from that media. You don't need to actually install Windows from this disk. Just continue the installation up to the screen where it displays a list of drives to which Windows could be installed.

3) Once you reach the screen where you select the drive to install to, STOP AT THIS SCREEN. Your goal on this screen is to simply verify the following items:

A) Make sure that the mouse / touchpad / other pointing device and / or touchscreen are working.

B) Make sure that your NVMe drive can been seen (Yes, this will require that you swap in the NVMe drive before doing this).

If both of the above are working properly, then in all likelihood, everything should work well after restoring you image to this drive.

hsehestedt said:

1) Make a backup disk image copy of the SATA drive.

Click to expand...

I'm one who agrees restoring images are preferable to cloning. Let me add to this step. To image your disk you must use a third party imaging tool. I do not think ddrescue will do that. In all my reading on this forum, I don't recall anyone using ddrescue to clone either. Most 3rd party tools that can image can also clone.
Here's a few imaging and cloning tools: Top 5 Free & Reliable Hard Disk Drive Cloning Software

To clarify, I am only cloning the OS partition. The original OS that came with the new computer has been backed up to the end of the drive in case I have to give up and use PCMover. ddrescue will do a byte for byte copy of a drive or partition to another physical device or to an image, but I don't see the advantage of creating an image and it adds time to the process. If there's a particular free program anyone can recommend that works some sort of magic with the NVMe drivers that aren't being loaded, I'll give it a try.

Multiple posts in multiple forums ... "Help, my clone doesn't work" (multiple circumstances, incl like yours)

Try image > restore image. Do the whole drive image, cloned disks frequently fail because users try to pick and choose partitions. That ain't gonna work.

If the old drive contains voluminous user files (e.g. heaps of music/videos/pictures, etc), remove these to another drive before the image process. Then all you're left with is a system+programs drive to image > restore.

EDIT : Forum favourite Macrium Reflect (free version from Majorgeeks), and/or AOMEI Backupper (freeware version) are your friends

idgat said:

Multiple posts in multiple forums ... "Help, my clone doesn't work" (multiple circumstances, incl like yours)

Click to expand...

And now there’s a post here.
It might bring in new members with similar issues. So a definitive answer for kahlil88 would be the objective.

Hi, kahlil88, welcome to the ElevenForums

With my 2TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD, booting Windows in Safe Mode and then booting it again normally turned out to fix the problem of not being able to boot it for me. This was after I had created an image of my Windows partition from an M.2 SATA SSD onto an external USB HDD, swapped the old M.2 SATA SSD with the new NVMe, and then finally restored the image from the external USB HDD onto the new NVMe (albeit I am only using the StorNVMe driver, not IRST, and using no VMD). So, when you try to boot Windows in Safe Mode, does it still fail to boot?

This is a great example of what can be a possible benefit of creating an image instead of cloning, i.e., it is to be able to still capture the necessary partition(s) and NOT have to wipe all the already existing data off of the external HDD to get the job done nicely. It's some ways similar to why I use Ventoy instead of use Rufus.

Off topic: reasons to still insist on continuing to use Rufus right now are getting really very close to nonexistent. Yet, anyone with basic reading skills can see that a lot of forum members still fail to see the benefit of being not forced to keep wiping all their data off of the USB, over and over and over again. I mean, not only wiping it off over and over and over again, but at the same time also failing to see over and over and over again why that isn't necessary anymore nowadays. But anyway...

On topic: just to be completely sure, am I right in assuming that the old SATA drive uses the GPT partition format? When you say "if I remembered to enable the stornvme driver on boot", I also am assuming you ran the command sc config stornvme start= boot on Windows right before you cloned the Windows partition in question. When you say you only cloned the Windows partition, I assume you already know how to manually re-create the ESP (EFI system partition) that is required for making it boot, which also involves copying of the BCD files from the Windows partition onto the newly created EFI partition. I also am assuming that you are certain that an IRST driver is required for the new NVMe drive to be recognized properly by this "fairly new HP laptop", and that you also already made sure (and doubly sure) to use the correct IRST driver for this.

Assuming that the booting in Safe Mode also didn't work, what happens if you, onto an external backup drive, create an image of the relevant partitions from the old SATA drive, and, next, you do a clean install of Windows 11 on the old SATA drive, and then finally, you try to clone that one onto the new NVMe?

kahlil88 said:

To clarify, I am only cloning the OS partition. The original OS that came with the new computer has been backed up to the end of the drive in case I have to give up and use PCMover. ddrescue will do a byte for byte copy of a drive or partition to another physical device or to an image, but I don't see the advantage of creating an image and it adds time to the process. If there's a particular free program anyone can recommend that works some sort of magic with the NVMe drivers that aren't being loaded, I'll give it a try.

Click to expand...

No error messages isnt very helpful.

Cloning with ddrescue and then booting the Win11 USB installer to rebuild the BCD (after manually loading the F6 driver every single time). I suspect the issue might be related to Intel RST failing to install. It loads something on the WinRE partition and never gives me an error but the program isn't there when I bo

Click to expand...

If you cloned with ddrescue, did you subsequently fix the cloned os drive letter?

hdmi said:

With my 2TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD, booting Windows in Safe Mode and then booting it again normally turned out to fix the problem of not being able to boot it for me. This was after I had created an image of my Windows partition from an M.2 SATA SSD onto an external USB HDD, swapped the old M.2 SATA SSD with the new NVMe, and then finally restored the image from the external USB HDD onto the new NVMe (albeit I am only using the StorNVMe driver, not IRST, and using no VMD). So, when you try to boot Windows in Safe Mode, does it still fail to boot?

On topic: just to be completely sure, am I right in assuming that the old SATA drive uses the GPT partition format? When you say "if I remembered to enable the stornvme driver on boot", I also am assuming you ran the command sc config stornvme start= boot on Windows right before you cloned the Windows partition in question. When you say you only cloned the Windows partition, I assume you already know how to manually re-create the ESP (EFI system partition) that is required for making it boot, which also involves copying of the BCD files from the Windows partition onto the newly created EFI partition. I also am assuming that you are certain that an IRST driver is required for the new NVMe drive to be recognized properly by this "fairly new HP laptop", and that you also already made sure (and doubly sure) to use the correct IRST driver for this.

Assuming that the booting in Safe Mode also didn't work, what happens if you, onto an external backup drive, create an image of the relevant partitions from the old SATA drive, and, next, you do a clean install of Windows 11 on the old SATA drive, and then finally, you try to clone that one onto the new NVMe?

Click to expand...

Yes, I ran sc config stornvme start= boot prior to cloning and used the existing EFI partition, just renamed the previous EFI dir and rebuilt the BCD for the new Windows system with bcdboot C:\Windows /S S: /l en-us /f UEFI(and I always check/assign the drive letters in diskpart).

I did finally get it booting today. Tried booting the new SSD in a USB enclosure and it had the same issue (hanging at a black screen after the spinning dots). Booted the Windows installer, mounted the SYSTEM registry hive in RegEdit and checked HKLM/System/MountedDevices to compare numbers. The entry for\DosDevices\C: didn't match, so I copied that key from the WinPE hive and deleted everything else (except the default key). Booted right up!

kahlil88 said:

Yes, I ran sc config stornvme start= boot prior to cloning and used the existing EFI partition, just renamed the previous EFI dir and rebuilt the BCD for the new Windows system with bcdboot C:\Windows /S S: /l en-us /f UEFI(and I always check/assign the drive letters in diskpart).

I did finally get it booting today. Tried booting the new SSD in a USB enclosure and it had the same issue (hanging at a black screen after the spinning dots). Booted the Windows installer, mounted the SYSTEM registry hive in RegEdit and checked HKLM/System/MountedDevices to compare numbers. The entry for\DosDevices\C: didn't match, so I copied that key from the WinPE hive and deleted everything else (except the default key). Booted right up!

Click to expand...

Manually deleting these keys isn't necessarily always a safe method, as they are cross-linked to other keys. AFAIK the recommended way to clean out leftovers from mounted devices is to run the mountvol /r command.