Unable to boot WIN7 from 2nd disc after cloning it with Aomei

Question

I have an external hard drive (drive P=1.5TB) + two internal hard drives (drive C=2TB and drive D=1TB). All drives are 75% free.

I have upgraded my D drive from Vista to WIN 7 and cleaned up the D drive. WIN7 is running 100% OK on my D drive The speed difference is amazing.

What I am trying to do

Eventually, I want to make my internal C drive, the main bootable drive with WIN7 on, instead of D. But for the moment, just boot up from P drive.

As a first step, and as a test, I cloned my D drive onto my external P drive with Aomei Backupper standard. But Win7 will not boot from the external P drive. I tried this after cloning with Aomei. I got a slightly more encouraging result from Aomei (v EaseUs) as my PC tries to start. I get an optimistic "Windows is loading files" message after the BIOS Flash Screen but then disappointment follows as the process jumps back to the BIOS screen going into a loop of BIOS screen -> Windows is Loading files -> BIOS screen->Windows is Loading files. So my QUESTION ONE IS: Can I / how can I use Aomei so that my PC is bootable from the clone on my external P drive, without having to use a boot media first.

If / when I can get that to work, I can then move onto phase 2, which is to clone from D to C -> then make C my start up drive. I guess I will need to change the order of HDD priority, via BIOS but QUESTION TWO please - will I need to switch the HDD jumpers to define master / slave - or is that a thing of the past (XP)?.

Any tips would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

If you have linux handy you could do:

fdisk #then#


dd if=/dev/... #whatever fdisk tells you has 1TB size# of=/dev/ #whatever fdisk tells you has 2TB in size#

What is inside ## is just a explanation.

Answer 2

Use EasyBCD to edit the bcd. You can run it from a winbuilder boot cd.

At the moment it sounds like windows is looking for it's files on a different drive. If windows was installed on drive d, then it's entry in the windows boot loader will need it to always be in that drive number/drive letter.