Dual Windows 11 boot issue

[Pricoky]

Greetings community! I come to you with a problem that I have been having for some time and cannot solve. I recently upgraded from Win10 to Win11. Considering I'm running a 256GB Samsung EVO 970Pro NVme PCIe x4 SSD the system was running at snail's pace. Already having a lot of applications installed and some custom settings, I kept trying all kinds of tricks found here on this forum or on the internet in general to revive the system but nothing worked. So I thought the last resort would be to reinstall a fresh Win11 on another partition of a Crucial P2 1TB PCI Express 3.0 x4 SSD I already had installed on the system. Although the latest SSD does not live up to the performance of the first, the fresh Windows 11 now moves flawlessly. I went ahead and reinstalled all the necessary apps from scratch. Now having no point in keeping the storage space occupied with the two operating systems I thought of formatting the original Samsung SSD with the idea of moving/cloning the new Win11 to it and for that I used AOMEI Partition Assistant. We all know that cloning an OS requires a reboot for AOMEI to do its job. And..surprise, the system now refuses to boot telling me there is no OS installed. I had to reinstall Win11 again on the Samsung SSD and managed to restore the boot entry from the Crucial SSD using EASYBCD. I went into AOMEI and reformatted the Samsung SSD again tried to clone the OS. And.. same story on boot, no OS found. It's driving me crazy.. I don't know how to proceed. The idea is that I would like to avoid having to install all the apps and everything else needed again.

 

[bug]

I am not familiar with Aomei, but are you sure you have cloned all the required partitions? In addition to your Windows partition, there should be at least another one for UEFI. Your Samsung drive should already have one since it's running Win11, but I'm not sure it will work as it is with a different Win11 install.

 

[Pricoky]

Well, it is not the first time I”m cloning or migrating an OS but I”ve never met this specific situation! I can only take a wild guess that it has something to do with the UEFI but I just can”t get it to work! Ohh.. forgot to mention that the motherboard is an AsusPrime X470Pro if it matters

 

[bug]

Just to be on the safe side, I'd just do a 1:1 clone of everything. Hopefully that will result in a bootable system. And then you can resize partitions as you wish.
If that fails, try 1:1 clone using dd (from a bootable Linux stick).

I know Windows has some partition GUIDs that need editing when you move an install from one disk to another (can't remember specifics), but your problems happens way before you'd hit that.

 

[Pricoky]

It just came to me now that I used to use a boot-able disk that contained all kinds of applications to fix problems when the system wouldn't boot. Such as devirusing, partitioning problems, etc. but I don't remember what it was called! I'm thinking that if I boot directly from such a disk I”ll eliminate the need to restart the system and maybe somehow trick the cloned windows into booting!

 

[bug]

Maybe this one? https://www.ultimatebootcd.com

Anyway, I am not familiar with your particular problem, so I'm going to take a step back.

 

[Pricoky]

Thanks! Yeah.. I don't know if it was this one in particular but I think something like that. Anyway I'm downloading right now and making a boot-able USB. I'll be back with feedback!

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Secure boot getting in the way ?
You still have both ssd's you cloned connected ?

If so that would be a clash for bios.

 

[Pricoky]

I also thought about the BIOS thing that is probably somehow stuck with the Samsung SSD and doesn't want to boot from the Crucial SSD or other fixed storage media in any form. I'm at work right now but I can't wait to get home to see if I can trick it with the boot-able stick from Ultimate Boot!

 

[bug]

I also thought about the BIOS thing that is probably somehow stuck with the Samsung SSD and doesn't want to boot from the Crucial SSD or other fixed storage media in any form. I'm at work right now but I can't wait to get home to see if I can trick it with the boot-able stick from Ultimate Boot!

Yeah, work. Always gets in the way of... everything.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
I would remove the original and only have the clone installed
Go to bios and delete/ clear existing secure boot keys and try again.

 

[Pricoky]

Dear God I managed to solve the problem . I ended up using VENTOY on a USB stick. A very easy to use tool that works and boots smoothly on UEFI systems too. I copied two ISOs to the USB stick, namely "WinPE 10-8 Sergei Strelec" which can be found here and an ISO with Windows 11. Basically I booted from the USB drive and went into WinPE. A lot of useful software can be found here. First I used AOMEI Partition Assistant to migrate Win11 from the Crucial SSD to the Samsung SSD. After restart, the system did not boot, showing the message in the attachment "The Boot Configuration Data for your PC is missing or contains errors". Somehow I expected that. I booted from the USB stick again into WinPE. I copied the boot loader "BCD" file from the Windows11 ISO to the desktop (this is located on the Win11 ISO in the "boot" folder) Then I used EasyBCD to create a new boot entry on the Samsung SSD where I loaded the BCD file which I copied earlier. Hit restart and VICTORY, the system booted from the Samsung SSD without any problems! Then, also with AOMEI I deleted the "old" Win11 from the Crucial SSD and everything is back to normal! If anyone else has similar problems you can try the above steps and it should be fine!

 

[bug]

Dear God I managed to solve the problem . I ended up using VENTOY on a USB stick. A very easy to use tool that works and boots smoothly on UEFI systems too. I copied two ISOs to the USB stick, namely "WinPE 10-8 Sergei Strelec" which can be found here and an ISO with Windows 11. Basically I booted from the USB drive and went into WinPE. A lot of useful software can be found here. First I used AOMEI Partition Assistant to migrate Win11 from the Crucial SSD to the Samsung SSD. After restart, the system did not boot, showing the message in the attachment "The Boot Configuration Data for your PC is missing or contains errors". Somehow I expected that. I booted from the USB stick again into WinPE. I copied the boot loader "BCD" file from the Windows11 ISO to the desktop (this is located on the Win11 ISO in the "boot" folder) Then I used EasyBCD to create a new boot entry on the Samsung SSD where I loaded the BCD file which I copied earlier. Hit restart and VICTORY, the system booted from the Samsung SSD without any problems! Then, also with AOMEI I deleted the "old" Win11 from the Crucial SSD and everything is back to normal! If anyone else has similar problems you can try the above steps and it should be fine!

Thanks for sharing the solution and glad to hear you made it work.
I hope this isn't some new Win11 feature, to make migrating between SSDs as hard as possible.