Laptop failed to boot after replacing HDD with cloned Samsung SSD

[PaulinHG]

This week I got round to upgrading my Pavillion DV7 6c52ea laptop to Windows 10. Earlier attempts back in 2015 when W10 was launched ended in failure and I returned to my original W7 setup. 
So, after successfully upgrading to W10 at last, I purchased a 500GB Samsung 860 Evo SSD. Today I cloned my laptop HDD onto the SSD. I replaced the HDD with the newly cloned SSD but on booting, I got a blue screen error :

‘Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We’ll restart for you’

there was also a line: Stop code: UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME’

This then repeatedly cycled until I switched the machine off. 
Any ideas?

The laptop is quite old and I posted several questions about this upgrade back in 2018 with all responses suggesting I could and should install a SSD. It was suggested back then that I may consider updating the BIOS, version  F.1B (2011) to F.1C (2013) though it probably wasn’t essential to do so. 
The BIOS (InsydeH2) is not like any BIOS I have seen previously. It seems very minimalistic.
So for the time being, I have refitted my (recently W10 upgraded) HDD but would desperately like to get the SSD up an running.

Can anyone help me out here please?

[erico]

You may need to reinstall the original HDD for a few reasons.

1) to go ahead and update the BIOS

2) to determine if your hard disk  volume type was MBR (master boot record) or EFI  (also known as GPT) format.

The error message you have seen with the SSD means specifically that Windows is having issues with the disk or its sector condition. That may be because of the type of volume is is setup to be during the Windows installation or that the cloning actually failed.

After you have reinstalled the original hard disk and booted to Windows, invoke a command line window. Type CMD in the search box and right click the Command icon that appears above and select  Run as Administrator.  A command line window will open. Type in diskpart and press enter to invoke the Microsoft diskpart utility.  Now type in list disk to see what the volume type of the disk is.  Once you see if the disk is listed as GPT you know it is EFI (GPT) and you can exit diskpart by typing exit, twice.

I await your replies.  I had problems with the Samsung Magician when I tried it in the past. I was fortunate in that I was a Microsoft MVP at the time and Paragon software provided me with copies of their cloning software, which worked flawlessly and produced  clones that actually worked as expected.

You may have also run into another issue. Microsoft changed their licensing scheme twice during the past coupe of years. Microsoft now keeps track of Windows 10 licensing on servers and the licenses in some cases are not transferable to new hardware.

[PaulinHG]

Hi Erico,

Thanks for your reply. I did actually reply to your remarks immediately but I cannot see my reply so I'm guessing it didn't get posted. Sorry.

In answer to your advice above, I didn't actually need to do anything because for some strange reason, my newly cloned and installed SSD started working!

To summarise, when it failed initially, I replaced the source HDD into bay 1 and put the SSD in bay 2. The laptop booted into W10 from the HDD as expected. When I checked the SSD,  it did have a complete copy of the source drive data suggesting the cloning of the data at least was successful. I then removed both drives and replaced the SSD in bay 1 with a view to doing a full clean install from the Win 10 installation DVD I had created previously using the Media Creation tool from Microsoft.

So now I have only the SSD installed. I have the DVD in the drive but on booting, I remembered I had not changed the boot order in the BIOS to CD/DVD drive first. I can't remember what actually happened next but I think a prompt appeared during the boot process asking me to select a bootable drive. I thought I selected the CD/DVD drive and so continued. However, instead of running the Windows 10 install from the DVD, the laptop continued to boot into W10! Remember, I hadn't changed anything or followed your advice about updating the BIOS or checking the disk partition information.

Puzzled, I removed the DVD disk from its drive and turned off the laptop.

I then rebooted, now with only the SSD installed and lo and behold, it did indeed boot directly into W10.

So for me, an unexpected but welcome success I suppose.

Everything is working fine, Windows 10 is running well, better and much faster than my Windows 7 setup did so I'm a happy chap as they say.

My only question now I suppose is it worth updating the BIOS to, I think, F.1C rev A or whatever it is (from Windows 10) as I noticed when I looked at the BIOS previously, there was a line stating 'Factory Installed BIOS = Win 7'?

Thanks for your help

Paul