• Got a new hard drive, cloned my old one to it but can't boot.
    2 replies, posted
I recently got a 2TB HDD to replace my almost filled up 500GB HDD. I don't want to have to dick around with multiple drives and partitions, so I decided I was gonna clone my original HDD and replace it. Anyway, I cloned it with ShadowCopy and changed the boot drive to the new one in the BIOS, but then I got the inaccessible boot device error. Oh well, I popped the Windows 7 install disk in, but it doesn't let me install Windows without deleting the contents of the new drive, after waiting hours to clone it. I pressed the upgrade option and it told me to reboot and let Windows run normally, which I can only do from the old drive. Is there any way to make the new drive bootable without having to re-clone? [editline]30th December 2014[/editline] After a googling session I've figured a couple of things out. 1. I didn't clone the system reserved partition, only the C: I copied them over afterwards on an unallocated partition on the new drive, but it still wouldn't boot properly. 2. I formatted the new HDD before I made the clone. It wasn't showing up in explorer so I thought I was supposed to do that. 3. I haven't even changed the SATA cables around to make the new drive the primary one. So, unless anyone have any input, I will likely have to go for removing the partitions and try cloning again properly tomorrow. BTW can anyone recommend any good free cloning software?
Download Hirens Boot CD and make a bootable CD or flashdrive. It should have several cloning tools in the backup category. That thing has saved my ass so many times, its a great tool to have laying around for the future too.
Unformatted and re-cloned with the system reserved partition too. Booted up with no problems. Never format before cloning I guess.
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