replacing hard drive

I am trying to replace my win10 80G hard drive with 300G drive.

I cloned the drive except that I increased the partition size from 80G to 300G.

When I boot the new drive, I get the following.

 

RECOVERY

Your PC/Device needs to be repaired.

A required device isn’t connected or can’t be accessed.

Error code 0x000000e

Press F8 for Startup Setting

When I press F8 I get:

The application or OS couldn’t be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors:

File: Windows\system32\winload.exe

 

I ran Spinrite on the drive and it is all good.

What is going wrong?

Is there a more reliable way to replace drives?

Any advice here will be appreciated.

 

Conversation 14 comments

  • jimchamplin

    Premium Member
    18 May, 2017 - 11:33 am

    <p>It's best just to reinstall clean, then migrate your data. I've seen too many cloned installs that somehow didn't work right to trust that.</p><p><br></p><p>I also never replace a drive if I don't have to. On a desktop, I just add the new drive, putting it on the first SATA port. and the older drive on SATA 2. That way the old drive remains untouched. If you need to boot into it, you can do so easily. My current "big" desktop has three drives. A 128GB Patriot SSD for Windows and apps, a 1TB 5400 RPM for data and a 500GB 10000 RPM drive for games and Visual Sudio.</p><p><br></p><p>But yeah, just install Windows clean. You get a fresh install with an up-to-date version, and you can go from there with only the software you need.</p>

  • evox81

    Premium Member
    18 May, 2017 - 12:56 pm

    <p>My first instinct: You cloned the primary partition on the 80GB drive, but not the supporting partitions that Windows requires.</p><p><br></p><p>Outside of that, I've always had bad luck when cloning a drive and changing the partition size outside of Windows before first boot. I typically clone the drive, boot up and ensure everything is good, then use a 3rd party Windows utility to resize the partitions from within Windows. </p>

  • norton2002

    18 May, 2017 - 3:58 pm

    <p>Thank you guys for your insight. Although I have never done this before, I thought that replacing the drive is a very common and straight forward thing to do. I guess not. </p><p>I could do a clean install from my recovery drive, but I think that re-establishing the PC to the way it was is a major pain. There have been tons of settings and tweaks over the year and I doubt that I can find all the install sources for my running apps.</p><p>I will try to clone the drive without messing with the partition size and see what happens.</p>

    • jimchamplin

      Premium Member
      19 May, 2017 - 12:06 am

      <blockquote><a href="#117806"><em>In reply to norton2002:</em></a></blockquote><p>Good luck! :D</p>

    • jimchamplin

      Premium Member
      19 May, 2017 - 12:13 am

      <blockquote><a href="#117806"><em>In reply to norton2002:</em></a></blockquote><p>Also, make sure that your new drive uses the proper partition scheme. Things have changed considerably in the last few years, and if you're not used to it, it can throw you off. Modern machines don't use BIOS anymore, trading up to UEFI, and require disks that use GPT partitioning as well as a 200MB UEFI partition at the front of the drive.</p>

  • norton2002

    19 May, 2017 - 9:05 am

    <p>Did not work even with a straight clone. Same error.</p><p>Both drives are SATA. The PC is an old Dell Pentium with BIOS which more than meets my needs.</p><p>The working drive has a primary partition and a strange 450MB recovery partition that was created by the win10 installation.</p><p>The cloning program that I us is EaseUS ToDo. Could the problem be this program?</p><p>Is there a better cloning app that is known to clone win10 drives?</p><p>Thanks </p>

  • Patrick3D

    19 May, 2017 - 12:54 pm

    <p>When using EaseUs Todo there will be 2 checkboxes you will want to be sure to check: sector by sector &amp; Optimize for SSD. The only potential hiccup I can think of that you may be running into would be if the BIOS settings for SATA on your computer was set to Compatibility or IDE mode instead of AHCI. Note that changing that setting may cause problems with your current Windows installation so be sure to backup any data first before messing with it.</p>

    • norton2002

      19 May, 2017 - 4:48 pm

      <p>Thanks for your input. The BIOS has SATA Operation set to Normal (not Combination).</p><p style="background-color: transparent;"> I have used successfully the ToDo software on my old XP systems without using those check-boxes but those partitions were all NTFS. I examined my running drive with the win10 Disk Management Utility and it shows that the funky Recovery partition file system is blank and contains no data (450MB size and 450MB free). This is obviously wrong and is what may be causing the problem. Cloning with sector by sector may do it but why Optimize for SSD. I thought that this is done only for SSD devices.</p><p><br></p>

    • norton2002

      13 June, 2017 - 11:37 am

      <p>I ran Todo with sector by sector &amp; Optimize for SSD checked. It said clone completed successfully. When I install the cloned drive in the pc I get the same error. To clone, I connect the drive using a USB enclosure. Could that be a problem? </p><p>When I inspect the cloned drive using the USB connection, it all looks good. The primary partition and all the files are there. I also can see that unidentified 450MB special partition.</p><p>This makes no sense. Any chance that MS has some anti-cloning technology in win10?</p><p>I hate to give up! </p><p><br></p>

      • rameshthanikodi

        13 June, 2017 - 11:49 am

        <blockquote><a href="#125202"><em>In reply to norton2002:</em></a></blockquote><p>have you tried <a href="https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/71432-partition-mark-active.html&quot; target="_blank">marking the partition as active</a>? Windows can't boot if the partition isn't marked as active.</p>

        • norton2002

          13 June, 2017 - 3:50 pm

          <p>I inserted the target drive in a usb enclosure. I connected the usb to the pc and ran win10 Disk Managment. It says:</p><p><br></p><p>C: 74GB NTFS Healthy (System, boot, pagefile, active, crash dump, primary partition)</p><p>E: 74GB NTFS Healthy (Active, primary partition)</p><p>Both drives also show the 450MB partition as Healthy (recovery partition)</p><p><br></p><p>When I replace the E: in place of the C: I get the error The application or OS couldn’t be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors:</p><p>File: Windowssystem32winload.exe</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

          • rameshthanikodi

            13 June, 2017 - 5:28 pm

            <blockquote><a href="#125298"><em>In reply to norton2002:</em></a></blockquote><p>can you share a screenshot of everything you see in disk management?</p>

  • adamjarvis

    13 June, 2017 - 5:38 pm

    <p>I have a feeling you booted into Windows 10 with the second drive in place, so the Windows 10 operating system has "seen this drive" previously, i.e. as drive E etc. The problem with this is, it gets assigned a drive letter in the OS, based on the unique id of the drive. Then when you then clone the OS to this drive, when it boots, it remembers this disk from previously and assigns the drive to Drive E: (as that is what it's drive letter was previously), so the boot loader no longer sees the OS on drive C. This used to be a common problem on previous OS's. </p><p>Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 SP5 has a built in tool to fix this issue, to reassign the system disk back to Drive C:. The Linux bootable version ISO of the software is the version to use, not the WinPE (Windows PreInstallation Edition). (I'd have dumped Windows long ago if it wasn't for Linux acting as a sticking plaster to fix issues, to get underneath Windows)</p><p>There maybe also other free tools that do this, (I'm thinking Visual BCD Editor, but it's not turn-key) the recommendation is not meant as an advert for Paragon, but Paragon HDM is my tool of choice for cloning. Others often recommend Macrium Reflect.</p><p>Disclaimer: I have no biz link/connection to Paragon Software.</p><p>When unsure, It's always best to pay people to do this, especially when you have valuable data to lose. You can waste hours, and its a fairly straightforward job that shouldn't be expensive, for someone that does this day in day out. You've now made the job more difficult, than it should have been.</p>

  • AnOldAmigaUser

    Premium Member
    13 June, 2017 - 7:18 pm

    <p>I always have a system image and a recovery disk. Then pull the old disk, replace with the new one, boot to the recovery disk and restore the system image. If, as is the case here, the new disk is larger, the image builds the primary partition to the size of the old disk. I use disk manager to extend it to the full size of the new disk.</p><p><br></p><p>Then I restore any files updated since the last system image.</p>

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