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I have a 1 tb HDD that I am cloning to a m.2 NVME SSD that is 500 GB. I have them both at GPT so that is no issue and I use AOMEI as the cloning tool as it has worked many times for me without an issue. I have cloned it a few times now trying different things to fix it and nothing is working for me.

It keeps coming back giving me the

error code:0xc000000e

File:\windows\system32\Winload.efi

I have encountered this problem many times and the normal fix did not work in this occasion. The normal fix is assign the EFI partition with a letter the use the command bcdboot and copy everything from the EFI partition to the C drive and what not and it resolves the issue everytime except this time. However after I run that command it comes back with the upside down smiley face blue screen and then an error code:0xc0000001.

I have tried cloning it a couple times to see if it was a bad clone but no. I have also made sure that the old one can still boot it up and it can so I do not know where to go from here. All help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

13 Spice ups
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I think the first thing people will suggest is using different cloning tools. Often times a different tool will just get the job done, rather than wasting time finding the cause.

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I mean if I have to then I will I was just hoping I could find the actual reason for failure here.

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All I have is a workaround.

We use EaseUS but when we have run into the issue you have mentioned we have used NIUBI and it has worked " Download NIUBI Partition Editor Product Editions | Download Center ".

I have no idea why.

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Macrium Reflect works great but they don’t offer the free version anymore, you can still get it fairly easily though.

In desperate times, I have even done a fresh installation of Windows on the new drive.

Then I imaged ONLY the OS partition from the old drive and replaced the new OS partition with that one using Macrium.

This can resolve any boot errors you are unable to resolve otherwise.

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How long will it take you to re-install your software and apps, compared to time on forums looking for a way to clone a disk that may not work, how long have you spent on it now?

I find the less I install and the more default windows I use, the quicker a rebuild is if I have to.

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I definitely could have spent less time just starting it from scratch and installing everything one by one but I want to figure out this issue because I am sure this will not be the last time and also people can be real particular as to where their stuff goes. I just know a clone normally gets it back to them looking just how I left with it except way faster. I think I might have found the problem but not sure and I will update the forum once I figure out what I am going to do.

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There are fixes to ‘where stuff goes’

Use FR or KFM to backup their data, so in the event of a rebuild, their data remains server side and will sync back down.

I’d bet they would rather their data in any order than not at all, too.

Good luck.

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Usually cloning drive to drive the size needs to match.

If you want to do partition cloning you need to create the same sizes and clone.

Or, resize the largest partition on old drive and clone to new drive.

Used Clonezilla for this.

If the cloning software is smart it can do this.

Otherwise, cloning drive to drive needs to be same size.

Are you able to get an 1TB NVMe ? That would solve a lot of issues.

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Free version support retires Jan. 1 2024. Get it while you can. And the current versions will continue to work.

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You can also export the current desktop “theme” and reimport it to the new (freshly installed Windows OS) drive after restoring files from backup. That saves some time, too. I had found that useful when updating some users from Win7 to Win10.

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I’ve found that cloning to a larger drive is fine in most cases. The issue I ran into was partitions restoring in the wrong order to the disk. It can prevent partition resizing until you backup and restore each partition manually one-by-one then manually correct the boot record. Since that’s been happening, I try to avoid cloning.

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The step of going from 1TB to 500GB is big and success will depend upon how full the original HDD is as well as what partitioning it has. The partitioning on the HDD could contain the items listed below. If it were me and I wanted to investigate the issue I would start by shrinking and arranging the partitions so that they only occupied the first 500GB before attempting the clone to see if that worked to give a clue as to the the failure cause.

MBR - protected - very small part of the hard drive reserved for holding the 4 partition information

Primary GPT Header - small part of the hard drive reserved for holding partition information on GPT/UEFI systems

System - FAT32 - Minimum size 100 MB but can be much bigger and if an OS is small enough it can fit in and work from here - called ESP or EFI - Linux will see it as sda1

MSR - Microsoft Reserved Partition - 16 MB size - no partition ID - Think it is NTFS - Linux will see this as sda2

Other Utility Partitions - such as a Dell 40 MB diagnostics one to work preboot - Think it is NTFS - Linux will see this as sda3

Windows Partitions - about 20 GB NTFS minimum but with updates that will jam up and you need at least 100 GB and hope the user does not have a large storage requirement - Linux will see this as sda4

Recovery Tools Partition - 500 MB advised size - Think it is NTFS - Linux will see this as sda5

Data Partitions - This is not a need but can be useful - NTFS- Linux will see this as sda6

Secondary GPT Header

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For me, everytime I had to clone SATA HD → SSD , M2, etc or different size of drives I had some issue.

The last times I needed to clone I used Clonezilla with a LiveLinux USB. You have got a lot of different options to try.

Hope you get it done!

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Been a while, but I think I had a similar issue once, with the combination of changing interface types while also shrinking partitions leading to a failure of some kind. IIRC, I took an intermediate step of first cloning the 1Tb SATA down to a 500Gb SATA I had laying around. Once I verified all was good, I cloned the 500Gb SATA to the 500Gb NVMe. I generally use the free version of Acronis True Image that comes with/only works with WDC/SandDisk drives (which is why I generally only buy those brand drives…I find Acronis works well for me so I just go with it).

I think I’ve also done what @peterw2300 ​ suggested and resized the partitions on the original. I just don’t like doing that as part of the beauty of cloning is the ability to put the unmolested original back in the system if the process goes south.

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What is your drive brand and model? Most brands will supply you with an OEM edition of our software for the task - Reddit - Dive into anything

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Ok, I just want to say thank you to everyone that helped out and gave me some tips. I did however end up finding the solution which was that because I switched from a SATA connection to an NVME connection. When the computer would boot up it would activate the SATA connection and when it failed it never activated the NVME driver which is why I kept getting the upside down smiley face.

SOLUTION: In the end my solution was booting back up the old drive and going to command prompt as an administrator and typing “sc config stornvme start=boot” and it changed it to where it activates the microsoft NVME generic driver from the startup. I then cloned the SSD from the old hard drive and Voila!!

I also heard that you couldve just booted the SSD in safe mode which will make it boot with as few of drivers as possible and then after it restarts it will pull all of the drivers needed but I did not try it that way so I cannot confirm that actually works.

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You mean a sad face.

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Yeah I am not exactly sure why I called it that but yes a sad face. lol!

@rod-it

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Had to log in to thank and +1 this post. I had been trying again and again on this issue on an Acer Spin SP513 laptop which has a dual SATA/NvME port inside. Found the suggestion to the clone as usual and then boot into safe mode, which worked like a charm. Didn’t have to do anything but that. Then reboot and everything is happy. Thank you Hagen-swc.

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