I bought a 7000mbps Sabrent NVME, I downloaded Acronis and cloned my old drive to the new one. Then in the BIOS I selected to boot from the new one, however it goes to a black screen with a point that sometimes does the loading thing endlessly. What am I missing? I'm guessing the cloning process just cannot be that easy, cause of course not.
I'm guessing considering only one is showing up in explorer, but both are in the disk utility thing.... a drive letter issue? I hope I can fix this without unplugging the other drive? That involves taking the whole PC apart Also how would I even wipe it so I could boot with it plugged in?
Partitions have their own unique IDs, and it can be that BCD configuration (still) contains old info with old partitions` IDs. Upd: You can dump BCD configuration by executing in elevated command prompt: bcdedit /enum ALL
How did you clone it? and can you not choose the new disk from within the Bios on the boot sequence ?
Macrium reflect is best one iv used for drive mirror, then select other nvme in bios and you're away.
I occasionally had a similar problem, the quickest solution was to do the very first part of a brand new OS installation up until it reboots. The drive now has a correctly installed boot system. Then restore only the cloned images "OS partition", it has always worked from then on. It seems there can be conditions that prevent the OS "boot system" from being correctly restored from a backup image.
This, also UEFI also tends to directly reference the offset of the necessary file within the partition instead of just looking it up by name (since name lookups are slower), this can be a problem when cloning to smaller disks or altering the partition layout during the cloning process. Certain tools are better at handing uefi disk/ssd to nvme clones than others, macrium reflect as @insp1re2600 mentioned being one of them.
Most new drives ship with something like Acronis anyway but have also used AOMEI before which is decent and free
After you cloned the disk you boot from Windows installation media and delete all partitions on old disk from installation app (and then cancel installation). But, BCD configuration can address partitions using a logical disk number, and (obviously) your new disk logical number differs from old one. So it is a better approach with cloning to remove old disk and connect new one to the same SATA/M-2 port, or at least swap old and new one. That way BCD will still point to correct disk number.
You already cloned it. Your task is to boot from new (cloned) disk, and old disk can be reformatted just for a storage, right? If you do not need old disk as a bootable one you can delete all partitions there the way I described. And still, the best way would be swap disks. Open case, insert new disk instead of old one and try if it boots.
