BCD Error After Cloning From HDD To SSD

[Appletax]

Upgraded customer's desktop to an SSD. Cloned the OS using Acronis 2020. Worked great, until I erased the hard drive. Rebooted and was given this lovely error:



Tried repairing using bootrec commands with no luck.

Restored the Acronis image again. Worked. HDD was still formatted so no issues there.

How can I prevent this in the future? I want to clone the drive to an SSD, keep the HDD for extra storage and format it, and have no BCD issues.

 

[Porthos]

How can I prevent this in the future? I want to clone the drive to an SSD, keep the HDD for extra storage and format it, and have no BCD issues.

Disconnect the old drive.
I always image the old drive to my external. This way I have the image and the old drive. After the new drive is stable and has no errors, and before delete the image from my external, I create an image on their backup drive after formating it so now they have it backed up and set it to auto monthly backup with Macrium.

I never do clones unless I am attempting data recovery.

I do this to protect the user's data while I have the computer.

Keep in mind, I am not mobile and use my fast machine with a dual HD dock connected to my SATA ports.
Been using the same dock since 2018

 

[Sky-Knight]

Yep, you clone / image the drive, disconnect the old one, boot the new one... I do both, and they both work. You just can't have the target disk connected to the system during boot at the same time as the source after a clone completes.

Once that's good and working and you know things are OK, then you toss the old drive on a USB enclosure or into another machine so you can diskpart, select disk, clean. Once that's done you can stuff it back into the original system and partition / format it for use.

Modern boot sectors use partition GUIDs to boot, the cloning process duplicates that GUID to another device. Computers don't like things being named the same...

Anyway if the new disk doesn't boot when the old one is disconnected, something went wrong. Time to try again.

 

[Diggs]

until I erased the hard drive

As I mentioned in another thread I return the old drive to the customer in an anti-stat bag with the date. It's good backup for them as even with errors their stuff can still be read in 10 years. Good drives I offer to put in an external enclosure. If I reformat it I'll immediately copy the big three folders (documents, pictures, desktop) back to it and have them use the drive for backup in the future. ...just like @Porthos I don't do anything unless I have a good image on the DAS in RAID from their old drive. If the drive won't image then it's off to Linux Land and ddrescue on to another drive and that drive imaged.