HP Omen won't boot after clone of main drive.

[Alteredego]

Got myself in a real pickle here. The nvme pcie/m2 drive on the base machine was a little small so just bought an upgrade. Didn't want to lose some sensitive settings like my wsl2 setup and windows insider preview so cloning was the obvious choice. Only 1 m2 slot so cloned to an intermediate sata ssd with clonezilla live. Went smooth, Booted fine. Cloned from the ssd to the new drive. Booted once, and looked ok... But only once. Now I only get a boot error blue screen, says I need to repair but can't find the repair media which is on that same drive. Ok. Maybe something is weird with the drive. So I pop in my old m2 drive. Also doesn't boot! Also blue screen saying I need to repair. Help! Did I flag something that think I am trying to steal windows so destroys the OS? Drives are fine and can read data when I boot via a Linux usb drive, still have good bios. Just can't get the OS to boot no matter what I try. What did I do this time?

[WAWood]

@Alteredego 

I use Clonezilla to do drive cloning in Linux, but I use Macrium Reflect (MR) to do drive cloning in Windows.

The main reason is that while the first generally works, I really do not like the backwards interface and prefer the more straightforward interface of MR -- and they are both free and can both be run from their own boot media.

As to your situation, it certainly sounds like one of the cloning operations trashed the original boot drive -- even though that should not have happened.

All I can really recommend at this point is that you consider doing a factory reset to restore your PC to working condition. I would disconnect any HDDs you have in the PC prior to doing that, and I would also use the new, larger SSD.  You can always go into it later and resize the partitions to fill the drive.

Here are the following ways to accomplish a factory reset:
- Factory reset using external HP image you make
- Factory reset using external HP image you buy

Each of these is discussed in some detail below ...
---------- Factory reset using external HP image you make ----------
HP provides a Cloud Recovery tool that you can use, together with a 32GB USB stick, to create your on HP reset media.

Here is the link: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06162205

This works the same as the factory reset described above.

---------- Factory reset using external HP image you buy ----------
For those PCs not supported by the Cloud Recovery, in some cases, HP offers Recover Media for sale. This can not be downloaded; instead, it must be ordered from HP.

HP Recovery Media is a set of DVDs and a CD, or USB stick, that will erase the hard drive (removing all data, settings, and applications, reinstall the original OS, drivers, and some HP Utilities.

In some cases, you may be able to order a USB stick instead of disks.

You can look online for Recovery Media starting with the linked paged: http://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers

Once there, input your Product name or number. On your Software and Drivers Download page, select your Operating System and and Version. Click &quot;Update&quot;.<br><br>If HP Recovery Media is available for your machine, down near the bottom of the page, you will see an entry for Order Recovery Media-CD/DVD/USB. Click the &quot;+&quot; symbol to expand that entry and click on Order Media for details.

Or, if you prefer, you can do the same by contacting HP Customer Support.

HP contact info: https://support.hp.com/us-en/contact-hp?openCLC=true

If HP no longer carries the media you need, another site you should check for HP Recovery Media is: http://www.computersurgeons.com/

These work the same as the factory reset described above.