Drive Clone Boot Failure

[PeterOz]

Have you tried to boot without Disc 0 connected.

[Melancholic_Mage]

Thank you for that, I’ll look into it.

I do. Yes, it’s a GPT. My Seagate and Samsung are MBRs. My Crucial NVME and Toshiba are GPTs.

I haven’t tried that. At this point I’m a little reluctant since I’ve spent so much time restoring my system over the past few days to how it once was. (And embarrassed at the mess I’ve made.) Do you think if I boot without Disk 0 my old OS may come back into the fold if I boot priority my SATA SSD?

[Melancholic_Mage]

I’m trying to follow AOMEI Backupper but I’m having trouble. I want to move system reserved from Disc 0 to disc 3, but not only do I have two active partitions which make this confusing (Samsung SSD (D: ) and System Reserved (H: ) but the tutorial video suggests cloning the OS to an external HDD if using their software. Which would just make a new system reserved partition on the external, and not actually move the one I have from disc 0.


At current I’m working on clearing my external HDD to make another system clone in case I botch the process by doing it manually in Disk Management, but cloning is how I got into this mess to begin with. Leaning towards @PeterOz 's signature of ‘If in Doubt Do Nothing’.

[PeterOz]

If your bios is set to legacy mode then it uses MBR & System Reserved.
If your Bios is set to UEFI then it does not use System Reserved.
It uses the efi partition.
Do you know what mode the bios is set to.

[PeterOz]

See if this helps as to why we need to know how the bios is set. Click On Me
Scroll down to
[HEADING=2]What Is System Reserved Partition ( Legacy BIOS + MBR).[/HEADING]
If you are in UEFI mode then you do not need system reserved.
If not clear come back before doing anything.

[PeterOz]

I think you should disconnect the Drive 0 and see if the nvme boots.
Want another opinion @phillpower2 @Pyro.
Phillpower2 & Pyro. to save reading everthing.
If you look at the pic in post#12 it shows efi on disk 3 NVME.
The op says the BIOS is set to UEFI and the drive is GPT.
In my opinion he does not need disk 0 for booting.
UEFI does not use the System Reserve Partition.

[Pyro]

I agree with Peter, try just booting with one drive - that looks like the leftovers of what was once an OS drive to me.

[Melancholic_Mage]

Thank you all. I unplugged disk 0 and it booted without issue - system appears to be using EFI partition. My BIOS is UEFI + LEGACY, and yes my NVME is GPT.

Last few questions. Do I need to change the EFI partition to active and can I delete the System Reserved partition on disk 0 without incident?

[PeterOz]

Do I need to change the EFI partition to active

Why

it booted without issue

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

can I delete the System Reserved partition on disk 0 without incident?

Yes. It just means that drive won’t be bootable.
If you are worried make a disk image.

[Melancholic_Mage]

Why

I don’t know, I thought maybe this was important and necessary so I asked.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Fair point.

Yes. It just means that drive won’t be bootable.
If you are worried make a disk image.

That drive’s just for storage and not for booting so happy days.

Thank you so much for helping me everyone and dealing with my own self-induced s***. You may take me away now. Take care.

[IMG alt="eS5naWY" width="400px" height="198px"]https://imgs.search.brave.com/FWrVEKMw4i-1I61HCdx64bp8OK1PMjw2a4LXEuzA_Kc/rs:fit:400:198:1/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWRp/YS5naXBoeS5jb20v/bWVkaWEvWjdkcjQ0/RlJkOVNWTy9naXBo/eS5naWY.gif[/IMG]

[PeterOz]

Your welcome
I am sure the others agree
We are glad we could help