Ok so I recently purchased a new SSD and would like to clone my Windows Partition (drive 1) and its bootloader which is located on drive 2 [Different Hard Drive]. Whenever I try to copy the System Reserved partition from drive 2 to a small partition on the SSD it does not work and the bootloader becomes irreversibly corrupted and Windows needs to be restored via System Image Restore.
Any suggestions?
Unless you have a WInPE boot ISO, this is going to be an exercise in futility. I would just do a reinstall and save yourself the hassle unless you have an in-depth understanding of deployment command line tools, Sysprep, BCDBoot and unattended.xml files.
That being said, you would need to build a WinPE iso, inject drivers into it, sysprep your PC while preserving drivers, capture the image to a second system from commandline, repartition the SSD from commandline and lay that down on the new SDD and rebuild the bootrecord on the system partition.
Chances are good that unless you're familiar with WinPE, DISM, and BCDBoot, you'll waste exponentially more time than just doing a fresh install on your SSD, and/or worse yet, lose all the data on your current install.
Note: I'm not saying it can't be done, just not the best approach for what you're really trying to do.
bootrec /rebuildBCD
