Crash course in Windows UEFI / bootloader

[92saturnsl2]

Curious if anyone is knowledgeable in this subject.

Built a new PC for the owner of the company I work for. Although I'm normally against it (I prefer clean Windows install on new PC), he wants drive cloned from old PC to new. Can't blame him, busy guy with no time, wants PC to work just like before. I didn't see any red flags-- Intel I7-9700 platform to a Z790 Raptor Lake (13 series) w/ DDR5. Windows should place nice. Normally I like to clone the old system drive to the new one in a different working PC (that way I have the old backup in case Windows freaks out or does something dumb when you first fire it up on newer hardware), but in this case it was a SATA SSD to NVME transition (on the newer system) and I didn't want to take the time to install the new NVME drive into another system.

System fired up fine on the old SATA drive, worked just like before on the new PC. Had a few missing chipset drivers visible in Device Manager, quick work to sort that out. I installed Macrium Reflect to clone the drive, it did a couple Windows updates, I thought everything was fine. I had to erase all the partitions off the new NVME drive for cloning (I had installed Windows on it when it was the only drive installed just for testing the PC hardware), so I did so through DISKPART in the command prompt, since Disk Management will not erase system partitions off the new drive. But the old drive was left alone. Pretty simple process, or so I thought.

Restarted after new drivers were installed and was going to clone the drive. Booted immediately into recovery mode, would not go into Windows at all.

To make a long story short, I spent about an hour and a half on Google before finally stumbling across this website: (https://woshub.com/how-to-repair-uefi-bootloader-in-windows-8/) where I got a crash course in BCDEDIT and BCDBOOT executables. Had to edit a few of the entries in the BCD file by hand using BCDEDIT, but finally got the dang thing working.

Still not sure what I did wrong, I left the old SATA drive alone-- the UEFI BIOS was booting to that drive just fine, and the Windows Boot Loader entry always appeared in the BIOS for the old SATA drive. The only partitions I erased were on "disk 2" which was the new NVME drive that Windows wasn't even running off of, but that was enough to break it. I think moving the drives to another PC for cloning would have been worth the time!

 

[dishdude]

UEFI is a PITA. Finally found a program called Rufus that allowed me to create a bootable USB drive with the W11 iso that the BIOS would allow to run.

 

[dubber09]

In most cases you need to load Intel RST driver to get access to NVMe disk.

 

[JustinH]

should have just migrated the data to the new drive, and installed fresh on the new computer.

Did you consider drivers from old computer to new, and a ton of other problems?

 

[92saturnsl2]

should have just migrated the data to the new drive, and installed fresh on the new computer.

Did you consider drivers from old computer to new, and a ton of other problems?

Windows is actually getting rather good at not corrupting itself / freaking out when transitioning to a new system. I would maybe hesitate if I were going from an AMD platform to Intel or something drastic, but a 9 series Intel platform to a 13 series should be a piece of cake. I've done it many times and Windows will often download the appropriate drivers automatically, though I usually comb the web for newest drivers.

It's the UEFI / Win bootloader that bungles things up, but admittedly because I don't know enough about it. I learned a lot, specifically how to identify the hidden system volumes and recreate/configure the boot loader by hand to point it in the right direction.

I'm with you 100% on clean Windows install on new PC, wouldn't have it any other way on my own systems. But some people simply won't have it and want the system the exact same way it was before, even after explaining the benefits of a fresh install. The dollars are flowing my direction so they can have it their way, even if it's not ideal.

 

[brianl703]

UEFI is a PITA. Finally found a program called Rufus that allowed me to create a bootable USB drive with the W11 iso that the BIOS would allow to run.

I discovered that the latest version of Knoppix has some bug that won't allow it to boot via UEFI. I ended up using a Debian live DVD for my purposes (breaking into Windows).

 

[Pew]

I've come across this a few times, specifically with cloning NVMe drives. Unfortunately had to do it for a client that wanted to keep everything exactly the same.

 

[KrisZ]

I did the same and went from an Intel platform to AMD with no hiccups. I think manually erasing partitions messed up the boot loader. I simply used the built in tool during the installation process to erase unwanted partitions, then new installation will erase the windows install. There is no reason to get rid of it before hand.